LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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SCHOOLS OF 
TO-MORROW 



BY 

JOHN DEWEY 

AND 

EVELYN DEWEY 




NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 









Copyright, 1915 

BY 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



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lEbe Iftnfcfeerboclier press, "Wew lOorfe 



M/IY 28 1915 

PCi,A4(!B04' 



PREFACE 

There has been no attempt in this book to 
develop a complete theory of education nor yet 
review any "systems" or discuss the views of 
prominent educators. This is not a text book 
of education, nor yet an exposition of a new 
method of school teaching, aimed to show the 
weary teacher or the discontented parent how 
education should be carried on. We have tried 
to show what actually happens when schools 
start out to put into practice, each in its own 
way, some of the theories that have been pointed 
to as the soundest and best ever since Plato, to 
be then laid politely away as precious portions 
of our "intellectual heritage." Certain views 
are well known to every teacher who has studied 
pedagogy, and portions of them form an ac- 
cepted part of every theory of education. Yet 
when they are applied in a classroom the public 
in general and other teachers in particular cry 
out against that classroom as a place of fads 
and caprices ; a place lacking in any far reach- 
ing aim or guiding principle. We have hoped 



PREFACE 

to suggest to the reader the practical meaning 
of some of the more widely recognized and ac- 
cepted views of educational reformers by show- 
ing what happens when a teacher applies these 
views. 

The schools we have used for purposes of 
illustration are all of them directed by sincere 
teachers trying earnestly to give their children 
the best they have by working out concretely 
what they consider the fundamental principles 
of education. More and more schools are grow- 
ing up all over the country that are trying to 
work out definite educational ideas. It is the 
function of this book to point out how the ap- 
plications arise from their theories and the 
direction that education in this country seems 
to be taking at the present time. We hope that 
through the description of classroom work we 
may help to make some theories living realities 
to the reader. On the other hand, we have 
dwelt on theoretical aspects in order to point 
out some of the needs of modern education and 
the way in which they are being met. 

The schools that are used for illustration were 
chosen more or less at random ; because we 
already knew of them or because they were 
conveniently located. They do not begin to 
represent all that is being done to-day to vitalize 



PREFACE 

the school life of children. Schools with like 
traits may be found in every part of the country. 
Space has forced us to omit a very important 
movement — the reorganization of the rural 
school and the utilization of agriculture in edu- 
cation. But this movement shows the tenden- 
cies that mark the schools we have described; 
tendencies towards greater freedom and an 
identification of the child's school life with his 
environment and outlook; and, even more im- 
portant, the recognition of the role education 
must play in a democracy. These tendencies 
seem truly symptoms of the times, and witli a 
single exception proved to be the most marked 
characteristics of all the schools visited. 

Without the very material help and interest 
of the teachers and principals of the schools 
visited this book would not have been possible. 
We thank them most sincerely for the unfailing 
courtesy they have shown in placing their time 
and the material of their classrooms at our dis- 
posal. Our thanks are especially due to Mrs. 
Johnson of Fairhopo and to Miss Georgia Alex- 
ander of Indianapolis for information and sug- 
gestions. The visiting of the schools with one 
exception was done by Miss Dewey, who is also 
responsible for the descriptive chapters of the 
book. 

J. D. 



CONTENTS 

chapter page 

1 Education as Natural Development .... 1 / 

II An Experiment in Education as Natural De- 
velopment 17 

III Four Factors in Natural Growth . . . .41 

IV The Reorganization of the Curriculum ... GO 
V Play 103 

VI Freedom and Individuality 132'^ 

VII The Relation of the School to the Community 164 

VIII The School as a Social Settlement .... 205 

IX Industry and Educational Readjustment . . 229 * 

X Education Through Industry ., 25 1>^ 

XI Democracy and Education 287 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGB 



A Test with Books Open. (Fairhope, Ala.) Frontispiece 

(1) Nature would Have Children Be Children before 

They Are Men. 

(2) Teach the Child What Is of Use to Him as a Child. 

(Teachers' College, N. Y. City) .... 8 

To Learn to Think, We must Exercise Our Limbs. 

(Francis Parker School, Chicago) ... 15 

(1) An Hour a Day Spent in the "Gym." 

(2) The Gully Is a Favorite Textbook. (Fairhope, 

Ala.) ..... 



Games often Require Muscular Skill, Reading, Writing, 
AND Arithmetic. (University School, Columbia, 
Mo.) 



(1) The Basis of the Year's Work. (Indianapolis) 

(2) Printing Teaches English. (Francis Parker School, 

Chicago) ....... 

Songs and Games Help Arithmetic. (Public School 45 
Indianapolis) ...... 



30 



45 



58 



75 



The Pupils Build the School-Houses. (Interlaken 

School, Ind.) ....... 87 

Real Gardens for City Nature Study. (Public School 

45, Indianapolis) ....... 97 

(1) Making a Town, instead of Doing Gymnastic Exer- 

cises. (Teachers' College Playground, N. Y. City) 

(2) Gymnasium Dances in Sewing-Class Costumes. (How- 

land School, Chicago) ...... 108 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACINQ 
PAGE 



Constructing in Miniature the Things They See around 

Them. (Play School, New York City) . .118 

Using the Child's Dramatic Instinct to Teach History. 

(Cottage School, Riverside, III.) . . . 129 

Learning to Live through Situations That Are Typical of 

Social Life. (Teachers' College, N. Y. City) . 140 

Solving Problems in School as They would Have to be Met 

OUT OF School. (Francis Parker School, Chicago) 159 

The Pupil Stays in the Same Building from Day Nursery 

Through High School. (Gary, Ind.) . 177 

Special Teachers for Special Subjects from the Very 

Beginning. (Gary, Ind.) ..... 193 

(1) The Boys Like Cooking More than the Girls Do. 

(2) Mending Their Own Shoes, to Learn Cobbling. 

(Public School 26, Indianapolis) .... 218 

Learning Moulding, and Manufacturing School Equip- 
ment. (Gary, Ind.) ...... 255 

Real Work in a Real Shop Begins in the Fifth Grade. 

(Gary. Ind.) 269 

(1) Children Are Interested in the Things They Need 

TO Know about. (Gary, Ind.) .... 284 

(2) Making Their Own Clothes in Sewing Class. (Gary, 

Ind.) 

Training the Hand, Eye, and Brain by Doing Useful Work. 

(Gary, Ind.) 297 



SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

CHAPTER I 

EDUCATION AS NATURAL. DEiVELOPMENT 

*'We know nothing of cMldhood, and with 
our mistaken notions of it the further we go 
in education the more we go astray. The 
wisest writers devote themselves to what a man 
ought to know without asking what a child is 
capable of learning." These sentences are 
typical of the ' * Emile ' ' of Rousseau. He insists 
that existing education is bad because parents 
and teachers are always thinking of the accom- 
plishments of adults, and that all reform de- 
pends upon centering attention upon the pow- 
ers and weaknesses of children. Rousseau said, 
as well as did, many foolish things. But his 
insistence that education be based upon the na- 
tive capacities of those to be taught and upon 
the need of studying children in order to dis- 
cover what these native powers are, sounded 
the key-note of all modem efforts for educa- 



2 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

tional progress. It meant that education is not 
something to be forced upon children and youth 
from without, but is the growth of capacities 
with which human beings are endowed at birtM 
From this conception flow the various con- 
siderations which educational reformers since 
his day have most emphasized. 

It calls attention, in the first place, to a fact 
which professional educators are always for- 
getting; What is learned in school is at the 
best only a small part of education, a rela- 
tively superficial part ; and yet what is learned 
in school makes artificial distinctions in so- 
ciety and marks persons off from one another. 
Consequently we exaggerate school learning 
compared with what is gained in the ordinary 
course of living. We are, however, to correct 
this exaggeration, not by despising school learn- 
ing, but by looking into that extensive and more 
efficient training given by the ordinary course 
of events for light upon the best ways of teach- 
ing within school walls. The first years of 
learning proceed rapidly and securely before 
children go to school, because that learning is 
so closely related with the motives that are 
furnished by their own powers and the needs 
that are dictated by their own conditions. 
Rousseau was almost the first to see that learn- 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 3 

ing is a matter of necessity ; it is a part of the 
process of self-preservation and of growth. ^ If « 
we want, then, to find out how education takes 
place most successfully, let us go to the experi- 
ences of children where learning is a necessity, 
and not to the practices of the schools where it 
is largely an adornment, a superfluity and even 
an unwelcome imposition. 

But schools are always proceeding in a direc- 
tion opposed to this principle. They take the 
accumulated learning of adults, material that 
is quite unrelated to the exigencies of growth, 
and try to force it upon children, instead of 
finding out what these children need as they 
go along. ''A man must indeed know many 
things which seem useless to a child. Must 
the child learn, can he learn, all that the man 
must know ? Try to teach a child what is of use 
to him as a child, and you will find that it takes 
all his time. Why urge him to the studies of 
an age he may never reach, to the neglect of 
those studies which meet his present needs? 
But, you ask, will it not be too late to learn 
what he ought to know when the time comes to 
use it? I cannot tell. But this I know; it is 
impossible to teach it sooner, for our real 
teachers are experience and emotion, and adult 
man will never learn what befits Mm except 



4 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

under his own conditions. A child knows he 
must become a man ; all the ideas he may have 
as to man's estate are so many opportunities 
for his instruction, but he should remain in 
complete ignorance of those ideas that are be- 
yond his grasp. My whole book is one con- 
tinued argument in support of this fundamental 
principle of education." 

Probably the greatest and commonest mis- 
take that we all make is to forget that learn- 
ing is a necessary incident of dealing with real 
situations. We even go so far as to assume 
that the mind is naturally averse to learning — 
which is like assuming that the digestive organs 
are averse to food and have either to be coaxed 
or bullied into having anything to do with it. 
Existing methods of instruction give plenty of 
evidence in support of a belief that minds are 
opposed to learning — to their own exercise. 
We fail to see that such aversion is in reality a 
condemnation of our methods; a sign that we 
are presenting material for which the mind in its 
existing state of growth has no need, or else 
presenting it in such ways as to cover up the 
real need. Let us go further. We say only an 
adult can really learn the things needed by the 
adult. Surely the adult is much more likely to 
learn the things befitting him when his hunger 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 5 

for learning has been kept alive continuously 
than after a premature diet of adult nutriment 
has deadened desire to know. We are of little 
faith and slow to believe. We are continually 
uneasy about the things we adults know, and 
are afraid the child will never learn them unless 
they are drilled into him by instruction before 
he has any intellectual or practical use for them. 
If we could really believe that attending to the 
needs of present growth would keep the child 
and teacher alike busy, and would also provide 
the best possible guarantee of the learning 
needed in the future, transformation of educa- 
tional ideals might soon be accomplished, and 
other desirable changes would largely take care 
of themselves. 

It is no wonder, then, that Eousseau preaches 
the necessity of being willing to lose time. 
**The greatest, the most important, the most 
useful rule of education is : Do not save time, 
but lose it. If the infant sprang at one bound 
from its mother's breast to the age of reason, 
the present education would be quite suitable; 
but its natural growth calls for quite a different 
training." And he says, again, ''The whole of 
our present method is cruel, for it consists in 
sacrificing the present to the remote and uncer- 
tain future. I hear from afar the shouts of 



6 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the false wisdom that is ever dragging us on, 
counting the present as nothing, and breath- 
lessly pursuing a future that flies as we pursue ; 
a false wisdom that takes us away from the only 
place we ever have and never takes us any- 
where else." 

In short, if education is the proper growth 
of tendencies and powers, attention to the proc- 
ess of growing in the particular form in which 
it goes on from day to day is the only way of 
making secure the accomplishments of adult 
life. Maturity is the result of the slow growth 
of powers. Ripening takes time; it cannot be 
hurried without harm. The very meaning of 
childhood is that it is the time of growth, of 
developing. To despise the powers and needs 
of childhood, in behalf of the attainments of 
adult life, is therefore suicidal. Hence ''Hold 
childhood in reverence, and do not be in any 
hurry to judge it for good or ill. Give nature 
time to work before you take upon yourself her 
business, lest you interfere with her dealings. 
You assert that you know the value of time and 
are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that 
it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than 
to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is fur- 
ther from excellence than a child who has 
learned nothing at all. You are afraid to see 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 7 

him spending his early years doing nothing. 
What! Is it nothing to be happy, nothing to 
jump and run all day? He will never be so busy 
again all his life long. . . . What would you 
think of a man who refused to sleep lest he 
should waste part of his life?" Reverence for 
childhood is identical with reverence for the 
needs and opportunities of growth. Our tragic 
error is that we are so anxious for the results 
of growth that we neglect the process of grow-, 
ing. '* Nature would have children be children 
before they are men. If we try to invert this 
order we shall produce a forced fruit, imma- 
ture and flavorless, fruit that rots before it can 
ripen. . . . Childhood has its own ways of think- 
ing, seeing, and feeling." 

Physical growth is not identical with mental 
growth but the two coincide in time, and 
normally the latter is impossible without the 
former. If we have reverence for childhood, 
our first specific rule is to make sure of a healthy 
bodily development. Even apart from its in- 
trinsic value as a source of efficient action and 
of happiness, the proper development of the 
mind directly depends upon the proper use of 
the muscles and the senses. The organs of 
action and of reception are indispensable for 
getting into relation with the materials of 



8 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

knowledge. The child's first business is self- 
preservation. This does not mean barely keep- 
ing himself alive, but preservation of himself 
as a growing, developing being. Consequently, 
the activities of a child are not so aimless as 
they seem to adults, but are the means by which 
he becomes acquainted with his world and by 
which he also learns the use and limits of his 
own powers. The constant restless activities 
of children seem senseless to grown-up people, 
simply because grown-up people have got used 
to the world around them and hence do not feel 
the need of continual experimentation. But 
when they are irritated by the ceaseless move- 
ments of a child and try to reduce him to a 
state of quiescence, they both interfere with the 
child's happiness and health, and cut him off 
from his chief means of real knowledge. Many 
investigators have seen how a sound bodily 
state is a negative condition of normal mental 
development; but Rousseau anticipated our 
present psychology as to the extent in which the 
action of the organs of sense and movement is 
a positive cause of the unfolding of intelligence. 
''If you follow rules that are the opposite of the 
established practice and instead of taking your 
pupil far afield, wandering to distant places, 
far-off lands, remote centuries, the ends of the 





(i) Nature would have children be children before they are 
men. 

(2) Teach the child what is of use to him as a child. 
(Teachers College, N. Y. City.) 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 9 

world and to heavens themselves, you keep him 
to himself, to his own concerns, he will be able 
to perceive, to remember, and to reason in na- 
ture's order of development. As the sentient 
infant grows into an active being, his discern- 
ment keeps pace with his increase in strength. 
Not till strength is developed beyond the needs 
of self-preservation is the faculty of specula- 
tion manifested, for this is the faculty of em- 
ploying superfluous strength for other than 
necessary purposes. Hence, if you would cul- 
tivate your pupil's intelligence, cultivate the 
strength it is meant to control. Give his body 
constant exercise, make it strong and healthy 
in order to make him good and wise; let him 
work, let him do things ; let him run and shout ; 
let him be on the go. . . . It is a lamentable 
mistake to imagine that bodily activity hinders 
the working of the mind, as if the two kinds of 
activity ought not to advance hand in hand, and 
as if the one were not intended to act as guide 
to the other/' 

In the following passage Eousseau is more 
specific as to the way in which the physical 
activities which conduce to health and the 
growth of mind reenforce each other. "Phys- 
ical exercise teaches us to use our strength, to 
perceive the relation between our own and 



10 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

neighboring bodies, to use natural tools which 
are within our reach and adapted to our senses. 
... At eighteen we are taught in our schools 
the use of the lever ; every village boy of twelve 
knows how to use a lever better than the clever- 
est mechanician in the academy. The lessons 
the scholars give one another on the play- 
ground are worth a hundredfold more than what 
they learn in the classroom. Watch a cat when 
she first comes into a room. She goes from 
place to place; she sniffs about and examines 
everything. She is not still for a moment. It 
is the same with a child when he begins to walk 
and enters, as it were, the room of the world 
about him. Both use sight, and the child uses 
his hands as the cat her nose." 
' ''As man's first natural impulse is to meas- 
ure himself upon his environment, to find in 
every object he sees the qualities that may con- 
cern himself, so his first study is a kind of ex- 
perimental physics for his own preservation. 
He is turned away from this, and sent to specu- 
lative studies before he has found his own place 
in the world. While his delicate and flexible 
limbs and keen senses can adjust themselves to 
the bodies upon which they intended to act is 
the time to exercise senses and limbs in their 
proper business — the time to learn the relation 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 11 

between themselves and things. Our first 
teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, 
hands, and eyes. To substitute books for them 
does not teach us to reason ; it teaches us to use 
the reason of others rather than our own; it 
teaches us to believe much and to know little. ' ' 

''Before you can get an art, you must first 
get your tools ; and if you are to make good use 
of your tools, they must be fashioned sufficiently 
strong to stand use. To learn to think, we must 
accordingly exercise our limbs, our senses, and 
our bodily organs, for these are the tools of 
intellect. To get the best use of these tools, the 
body that supplies us with these tools must be 
kept strong and healthy. Not only is it a mis- 
take that true reason is developed apart from 
the body, but it is a good bodily constitution 
that makes the workings of the mind easy and 
correct. ' ' 

The passage shows how far Eousseau was 
from considering bodily development as a com- 
plete end in itself. It also indicates how far 
ahead he was of the psychology of his own day 
in his conception of the relation of the senses to 
knowledge. The current idea (and one that 
prevails too much even in our own time) was 
that the senses were a sort of gateway and 
avenue through which impressions traveled and 



12 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

tlien built up knowledge picture^ of tlie world. 
Rousseau saw that they are a part of the appa- 
ratus of action by which we adjust ourselves to 
our environment, and that instead of being pas- 
sive recieptacles they are directly connected 
with motor activities — with the use of hands 
and legs. In this respect he was more advanced 
than some of his successors who emphasized the 
importance of sense contact with objects, for 
the latter thought of the senses simply as pur- 
veyors of information about objects instead of 
instruments of the necessary adjustments of 
human beings to the world around them. 

Consequently, while he makes much of the 
senses and suggests many games for cultivating 
them, he never makes the mere training of the 
senses an object on its own account. **It is not 
enough," he says, ''to use the senses in order to 
train them; we must learn to judge by their 
means — we cannot really see, hear, or touch ex- 
cept as we have learned. A merely mechanical 
use of the senses may strengthen the body with- 
out improving the judgment. It is all very well 
to swim, run, jump, whip a top, throw stones. 
But we have eyes and ears as well as arms and 
legs, and these organs are necessary for learn- 
ing the use of the rest. Do not, then, merely 
exercise strength, but exercise the senses as the 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 13 

powers by which strength is guided. Make the 
best use of every one of them, and check the 
results of one by another. Measure, count, 
weigh, compare. Do not use force till you have 
estimated the resistance; let estimation of the 
effect always precede application of the means. 
Get the child interested in avoiding superfluous 
and insufficient efforts. If you train him to cal- 
culate the consequences of what he does and 
then to correct the errors of his prevision by 
experience, the more he does, the wiser he will 
become. ' ' 

One more contrast between teaching which 
guides natural growth and teaching which im- 
poses adult accomplishments should be noticed. 
The latter method puts a premium upon ac- 
cumulating information in the form of symbols. 
Quantity rather than quality of knowledge is 
emphasized ; results that may be exhibited when 
asked for rather than personal attitude and 
method are demanded. Development empha- 
sizes the need of intimate and extensive per- 
sonal acquaintance with a small number of 
typical situations with a view to mastering the 
way of dealing with the problems of experience, 
not the piling up of information. As Eousseau 
points out, the facility with which children lend 
themselves to our false methods is a constant 



14 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

source of deception to us. We know — or fancy 
we know — what statements mean, and so when 
the child uses the proper form of words, we 
attribute the same understanding to him. ' ' The 
apparent ease with which children learn is their 
ruin. We fail to see that this very ease proves 
that they are not learning. Their shining, pol- 
ished brain merely reflects, as in a mirror, the 
things we show them." Rousseau describes in 
a phrase the defect of teaching about things in- 
stead of bringing to pass an acquaintance with 
the relations of the things themselves. "You 
think you are teaching him what the world is 
like ; he is only learning the map. ' ' Extend the 
illustration from geography to the whole wide 
realm of knowledge, and you have the gist of 
much of our teaching from the elementary 
school through the college. 

Rousseau has the opposite method in mind 
when he says, ''Among the many short cuts to 
science we badly need one to teach us the art of 
learning with difficulty." Of course his idea 
is not to make things difficult for the sake of 
having them difficult, but to avoid the simula- 
tion of learning found in repeating the formulae 
of learning, and to substitute for it the slow and 
sure process of personal discovery. Text- 
books and lectures give the results of other 



EDUCATION AS DEVELOPMENT 15 

men's discoveries, and thus seem to provide a 
short cut to knowledge ; but the outcome is just 
a meaningless reflecting back of symbols with 
no understanding of the facts themselves. The 
further result is mental confusion; the pupil 
loses his original mental sure-f ootedness ; his 
sense of reality is undermined. ''The first 
meaningless phrase, the first thing taken for 
granted on the authority of another without the 
pupil's seeing its meaning for himself, is the 
beginning of the ruin of judgment." And 
again: ''What would you have him think 
about, when you do all the thinking for him!" 
(And we must not forget that the organized ma- 
terial of our texts and set lessons represents 
the thinking of others.) "You then complete 
the task of discrediting reason in his mind by 
making him use such reason as he has upon the 
things which seem of the least use to him." 

If it was true in Rousseau's day that informa- 
tion, knowledge, as an end in itself, is an "un- 
fathomable and shoreless ocean," it is much 
more certain that the increase of science since 
his day has made absurd the identification of 
education with the mere accumulation of knowl- 
edge. The frequent criticism of existing educa- 
tion on the ground that it gives a smattering 
and superficial impression of a large and mis- 



16 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

cellaneous number of subjects, is just. But the 
desired remedy will not be found in a return 
to mechanical and meager teaching of the three 
R's, but rather in a surrender of our feverish 
desire to lay out the whole field of knowledge 
into various studies, in order to ''cover the 
ground." We must substitute for this futile 
and harmful aim the better ideal of dealing 
thoroughly with a small number of typical ex- 
periences in such a way as to master the tools 
of learning, and present situations that make 
pupils hungry to acquire additional knowledge. 
By the conventional method of teaching, the 
pupil learns maps instead of the world — the 
symbol instead of the fact. What the pupil 
really needs is not exact information about to- 
pography, but how to^,,find> out for himself. 
"See what a difference there is between the 
knowledge of your pupils and the ignorance of 
mine. They learn maps ; he makes them. ' ' To 
find out how to make knowledge when it is 
needed is the true end of the acquisition of in- 
formation in school, not the information itself. 



CHAPTER II 

AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION AS NATURAL 
DEVELOPMENT 

Rousseau's teaching that education is a 
process of natural growth has influenced most 
theorizing upon education since his time. It 
has influenced the practical details of school 
work to a less degree. Occasionally, however, 
experimenters have based their plans upon his 
principles. Among these experiments is one 
conducted by Mrs. Johnson at Fairhope, Ala- 
bama. To this spot during the past few years 
students and expcits h^ve made pilgrimages, 
and the influence of Mrs. Johnson's model has 
led to the starting of similar schools in different 
parts of the United States. Mrs. Johnson car- 
ries on a summer course for training teachers 
by giving a working object lesson in her ideas 
at Greenwich, Connecticut, where a school for 
children has been conducted as a model. 

Her main underlying principle is Rousseau's 
central idea; namely: The child is best pre- 
pared for life as an adult by experiencing in 

17 



18 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

childhood what has meaning to him as a child ; 
and, further, the child has a right to enjoy his 
childhood. Because he is a growing animal who 
must develop so as to live successfully in the 
grown-up world, nothing should be done to in- 
terfere with growth, and everything should be 
done to further the full and free development 
of his body and his mind. These two develop- 
ments go on together; they are inseparable 
processes and must both be constantly borne in 
mind as of equal importance. 

Mrs. Johnson criticizes the conventional 
school of to-day. She says it is arranged to 
make things easy for the teacher who wishes 
quick and tangible results; that it disregards 
the full development of the pupils. It is ar- 
ranged on the fatal plan of a hothouse, forcing 
to a sterile show, rather than fostering all- 
around growth. It does not foster an individ- 
uality capable of an enduring resistance and of 
creative activities. It disregards the present 
needs of the child; the fact that he is living a 
full life each year and hour, not waiting to live 
in some period defined by his elders, when school 
is a thing of the past. The distaste of children 
for school is a natural and necessary result of 
such mistakes as these. Nature has not 
adapted the young animal to the narrow desk, 



AN EXPERIMENT 19 

the crowded curriculum, the silent absorption of 
complicated facts. His very life and growth de- 
pend upon motion, yet the school forces him into 
a cramped position for hours at a time, so that 
the teacher may be sure he is listening or study- 
ing books. Short periods of exercise are 
allowed as a bribe to keep him quiet the rest of 
the time, but these relaxations do not compen- 
sate for the efforts which he must make. The 
child is eager to move both mentally and phys- 
ically. Just as the physical growth must pro- 
gress together with the mental, so it is in the 
separate acts of a child. His bodily move- 
ments and his mental awakening are mutually 
dependent upon each other. 

It is not enough to state this principle with- 
out carrying its proof into practice, says Mrs. 
Johnson. The child with the well-nourished, 
active body is the child who is most anxious to 
do and to know things. The need of activity 
must be met in the exercise of the school, hour 
by hour; the child must be allowed to move 
about both in work and in play, to imitate and to 
discover for himself. The world of objects 
around him is an unexplored hemisphere to the 
child even at the age of six years, a world con- 
stantly enlarging to his small vision as his 
activities carry him further and further in his 



20 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

investigations, a world by no means so com- 
monplace to him as to the adult. Therefore, 
let the child, while his mnscles are soft and his 
mind susceptible, look for himself at the world 
of things both natural and artificial, which is 
for him the source of knowledge. 
V Instead of providing this chance for growth 
and discovery, the ordinary school impresses 
the little one into a narrow area, into a melan- 
choly silence, into a forced attitude of mind and 
body, till his curiosity is dulled into surprise 
at the strange things happening to him. Very 
soon his body is tired of his task and he begins 
to find ways of evading his teacher, to look about 
him for an escape from his little prison. This 
means that he becomes restless and impatient, 
in the language of the school, that he loses in- 
terest in the small tasks set for him and con- 
sequently in that new world so alluring a little 
while ago. The disease of indifference has at- 
tacked his sensitive soul, before he is fairly 
started on the road to knowledge. 

The reason for having a school where children 
work together is that the child must learn to 
work with others. Granting this, Mrs. Johnson 
has tried to find a plan giving the utmost lib- 
erty of individual development. Because the 
young child is unfitted by reason of his soft 



AN EXPERIMENT 21 

muscles and his immature senses to the hard 
task of settling down to fine work on the details 
of things, he should not begin school life by 
learning to read and write, nor by learning to 
handle small playthings or tools. He must 
continue the natural course he began at home 
of running from one interesting object to an- 
other, of inquiring into the meaning of these 
objects, and above all of tracing the relation 
between the different objects. All this must 
be done in a large way so that he gets the names 
and bearings of the obvious facts as they appear 
in their order. Thus the obscure and difficult 
facts come to light one after another without 
being forced upon the child's attention by the 
teacher. One discovery leads to another, and 
the interest of pursuit leads the child of his own 
accord into investigations that often amount to 
severe intellectual discipline. 

Following this path of natural growth, 
the child is led into reading, writing, arith- 
metic, geography, etc., by his own desire 
to know. "We must wait for the desire of 
the child, for the consciousness of need, says 
Mrs. Johnson; then we must promptly sup- 
ply the means to satisfy the child's de- 
sire. Therefore, the age of learning to read 
is put off until the child is well grounded in his 



22 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

experience and knowledge of the larger rela- 
tions of things. Mrs. Johnson goes so far as 
to prevent children from learning to read at 
too early an age. At eight or nine years, she 
thinks they are keen to explore books just as 
they have previously explored things. By this 
time they recognize the need and use of the in- 
formation contained in books ; they have found 
out they can get this information in no other 
way. Hence, the actual learning to read is 
hardly a problem; children teach themselves. 
Under the stimulus of interest in arriving at 
the knowledge of some particular subject, they 
overcome the mechanical difficulty of reading 
with ease and rapidity. Reading i,s not to them 
an isolated exercise ; it is a means of acquiring 
a much-desired object. Like climbing the 
pantry shelves, its difficulties and dangers are 
lost sight of in the absorbing desire to satisfy 
the mental appetite. 

Each of the subjects of the curriculum should 
be given to the child to meet a demand on his 
part for a greater knowledge of relations than 
he can get from studying objects. Arithmetic 
and abstract notions represented by figures are 
meaningless to the child of six, but numbers as 
a part of the things he is playing with or using 
every day are so full of meaning that he soon 



AN EXPERIMENT 23 

finds he cannot get along without a knowledge 
of them. 

Mrs. Johnson is trying an experiment under 
conditions which hold in public schools, and she 
believes that her methods are feasible for any 
public school system. She charges practically 
no tuition, and any child is welcome. She calls 
her methods of education ''organic" because 
they follow the natural growth of the pupil. 
The school aims to provide for the child the 
occupations and activities necessary at each 
stage of development for his unfolding at that 
stage. Therefore, she insists that general de- 
velopment instead of the amount of information 
acquired, shall control the classification of the 
pupils. Division into groups is made where it 
is found that the children naturally divide 
themselves. These groups are called ''Life 
Classes" instead of grades. The first life class 
ends between the eighth and ninth years; the 
second between the eleventh and twelfth, and 
since an even more marked change of interests 
and tastes occurs at the period of adolescence, 
there are distinct high-school classes. The 
work within the group is then arranged to give 
the pupils the experiences which are needed at 
that age for the development of their bodies, 
minds, and spirits. 



24 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

Doing forced tasks, assignment of lessons to 
study, and ordinary examinations have no share 
in the Fairhope curriculum. Hence, the chil- 
dren do not acquire that dislike of learning and 
mistrust of what a teacher or text-book says, 
which are unfortunately so common among 
scholars in the ordinary school. They exercise 
their instincts to learn naturally, without that 
self-consciousness which comes from having 
been forced to keep their minds on examina- 
tions and promotions. 

Bright and intelligent children often acquire 
a distaste for the schoolroom and what comes 
out of it, which they not only never wholly out- 
grow but which is a real handicap to them as 
they grow up, often preventing them from tak- 
ing their college work seriously, and making 
them suspicious of all ideas not actually deduced 
from their own experience outside the class- 
room. Perhaps they grow so docile they ac- 
quiesce in all authoritative statements whatso- 
ever, and lose their sense of reality. We tell 
our children that books are the storehouses of 
the world, and that they contain the heritage of 
the past without which we would be savages; 
then we teach them so that they hate books of 
information and discount what a teacher tells 
them. Incompetency is general not because 



AN EXPERIMENT 25 

people are not instructed enough as children, 
but because they cannot and do not make any 
use of what they learn. The extent to which 
this is due to an early mistrust of school and the 
learning associated with it cannot be overstated. 

The students at Fairhope will never have this 
handicap to contend with. They are uniformly 
happy in school, and enthusiastically proclaim 
their ''love" for it. Not only is the work in- 
teresting to the group as a whole, but no in- 
dividual child is forced to a task that does not 
appeal ; each pupil may do as he pleases as long 
as he does not interfere with any one else. The 
children are not freed, however, from all dis- 
cipline. They must keep at work while they are 
in school, and learn not to bother their neigh- 
bors, as well as to help them when necessary. 
Caprice or laziness does not excuse a child from 
following a healthy or useful regime. 

Mrs. Johnson feels that children in their early 
years are neither moral nor immoral, but simply 
unmoral; their sense of right and wrong has 
not yet begun to develop. Therefore, they 
should be allowed as much freedom as possible ; 
prohibitions and commands, the result of which 
either upon themselves or their companions 
they cannot understand, are bound to be mean- 
ingless; their tendency is to make the child 



26 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

secretive and deceitful. Give a child plenty of 
healthy activity. When he must be disciplined, 
do not appeal to a sense which he has not got, 
but show him by a little pain if necessary what 
his naughty act meant to his playmate. If he 
is to share in fun and good things with his fam- 
ily and friends, he must behave so that they will 
want his company. This is a motive which, a 
young child can understand, for he knows when 
his friends are agreeable or disagreeable to him. 
There is less in such a scheme of discipline that 
impels the child to shirk or conceal, to lie or to 
become too conscious of his acts, than in a dis- 
cipline based on moral grounds, which seems to 
the child to be a mere excuse for forcing him to 
do something simply because some grown per- 
son wants it done. 

Lack of self -consciousness is a positive gain 
on the side of happiness. Mrs. Johnson's 
scheme of discipline contributes toward that 
love of school and work which all teaching aims 
to establish. When work is interesting, it is 
not necessary to hamper children in their per- 
formance of it by meaningless restrictions and 
petty prohibitions. When children work will- 
ingly they come to associate learning with the 
doing of what is congenial. This is undoubtedly 
of positive moral value. It helps develop a con- 



AN EXPERIMENT 27 

fident, cheerful attitude toward work ; an ability 
to face a task without dislike or repulsion, which 
is of more real value in character building than 
doing hard, distasteful tasks, or forcing atten- 
tion and obedience. 

The division into age groups or '4ife classes" 
takes away that emphasis upon the pupils' fail- 
ures and shortcomings which is bound to be 
more or less evident where pupils are graded 
according to their proficiency in books. The 
child who is slow mentally is not made to feel 
that he is disgraced. Attention is not called to 
him and he is not prodded, scolded, or 
"flunked." Unaware of his own weaknesses, 
he retains the moral support of confidence in 
himself; and his hand work and physical ac- 
complishments frequently give him prestige 
among his fellows. Mrs. Johnson believes that 
the recitations and examination of the ordinary 
schoolroom are merely devices to make the work 
easier for the teacher; while the consciousness 
of what he does or does not "know," resulting 
from marks and grades, is harmful to the child 
just as an emphasis of his failures is harmful. 

Especially marked is the contrast of the class- 
room exercises at Fairhope with recitations 
where, sitting still with their books closed, the 
children are subject to a fire of questions from 



28 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the teacher to find out how much they remember 
of a lesson they are supposed to have "studied'* 
alone. To quote again from Rousseau: "He 
(the teacher) makes a point of showing that no 
time has been wasted; he provides his pupils 
with goods that can be readily displayed in the 
shop windows^ accomplishments which can be 
shown off at will. ... If the- child is to be ex- 
amined, he is set to display his wares; he 
spreads them out; satisfies those who behold 
them, packs up his bundle, and goes his way. 
Too many questions are tedious and revolting 
to most of us and especially to children. After 
a few minutes their attention flags; they cease 
to. listen to your everlasting questions and they 
answer at random." At Fairhope the children 
do the work, and the teacher is there to help 
them to know, not to have them give back what 
they have memorized. Tests are often con- 
ducted with books open, since they are not to 
show the teacher what the child can remember, 
but rather to discover his progress in ability 
to use books. Lessons are not assigned, but 
the books are open in the hands of the pupils 
and with the teacher they discuss the text, get- 
ting out of it all the joy and information pos- 
sible. This stimulates a real love of books, so 
that these children who have never been as- 



AN EXPERIMENT 29 

signed a lesson to study, voluntarily study the 
text after the class work. They are not tempted 
to cheat, for they are not put in the position of 
having to show off. 

The result of this system of discipline and 
study over and above satisfactory progress in 
the *4hree R's," is freedom from self-con- 
sciousness on the mental and moral side; the 
ability of a child to put all his native initiative 
and enthusiasm into his work ; the power to in- 
dulge his natural desire to learn ; thus preserv- 
ing joy in life and a confidence in himself which 
liberates all his energies for his work. He 
likes school and forgets that he is ''learning"; 
for learning comes unconsciously as a by-prod- 
uct of experiences which he recognizes as worth 
while on their own account. 

The following activities have been worked out 
at Fairhope as a substitute for the usual cur- 
riculum: physical exercise, nature study, mu- 
sic, hand work, field geography, story tell- 
ing, sense culture, fundamental conceptions of 
number, dramatizations, and games. In the 
second class map drawing and descriptive geog- 
raphy are added, for reading is acquired, and 
the number work is modified by the knowledge 
of figures. Each lesson is planned as a con- 
crete experience with a definite end in view, ap- 



30 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

pealing to the child as desirable. As would be 
expected from the emphasis put upon fol- 
lowing the development of the child, physical 
exercise plays an important part in the day's 
work. It comes every day, during the regular 
school hours and usually in the first part of the 
morning while the children are fresh and ener- 
getic. For an hour the school is outdoors in 
a field the children call *Hhe gym." Bars, 
horses, etc., are scattered about, and there is 
some one there to help them try new things and 
see that the work is well balanced, but formal 
gymnastics in the accepted meaning of the term 
do not exist. Mrs. Johnson believes that the 
distaste of children is sufficient reason for doing 
away with them, and that, since the growing 
child is constantly seeking of his own accord 
opportunities to stretch and exercise his mus- 
cles, all the school needs to do is to supply the 
opportunity, seeing to it that this is not in- 
dulged to the point of harming the child. The 
children fall naturally into groups; those who 
want to swing on the bars and rings, those who 
want to climb, to jump, or run, or throw, etc. 
Running usually takes the form of races ; a tree 
is used as a target in the stone throwing con- 
tests. The children themselves have invented 
games to use on the apparatus, and the hour in 




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(i) An hour a day spent in the " Gym." 
(2) The Gully is a favorite textbook. 
(Fairhope, Ala.) 



AN EXPERIMENT 31 

the *'gym" is one of the busiest in the day. It 
leaves the children eager and stimulated for 
their mental work, since it has meant no over- 
working of one set of muscles, no dull repetition 
of meaningless movements at some one else's 
command. Besides this regular time for exer- 
cise, the children may study outdoors, and many 
of the classes are conducted in the open air. 
Indoors there are games, handwork, and drama- 
tizations, all of which contribute to the phys- 
ical well-being of the children. There are no 
cramping desks, the pupil may sit where or 
how he pleases, or even move from place to 
place if he does not disturb his fellows. The 
classes go on in a room in which two groups, 
each of fifteen or more children, are working, 
and the necessary quiet and order exist. 
K Nature study and field geography are con- 
ducted almost entirely out of doors. The chil- 
dren go into the fields and woods and look at 
the trees and flowers, ask questions about them, 
examine the differences in bark, leaves, and 
flowers, tell each other what they think, and 
/., use their books to answer questions that the 
trees and plants have suggested to them. They 
learn the meaning of the words pistils, stamens, 
and petals with flowers they have gathered, or 
watch a bee carrying pollen from plant to plant. 



32 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

Individual pupils are encouraged to tell the class 
what they may have learned at home, to bring 
flowers from their gardens, or to tell of things 
they have seen. The class visit a neighboring 
truck farm, recognize as many vegetables as 
they can, and learn the names and character- 
istics of the new ones. When they are back in 
the schoolroom those that can write make a list 
of all the vegetables they can remember, thus 
combining with their nature lesson a lesson in 
writing. There is a garden in the school 
grounds where the pupils learn to plow, rake, 
and plant, watch their seeds come up and grow 
and flower. In a little plot of ground that is 
their own, they observe all the phases in the 
cycle of plant life, and besides get the benefits 
of the moral training that comes from carrying 
through a piece of work that lasts several 
months and demands constant thought and care. 
This sort of work plays a large part in the cur- 
riculum of the younger children, for it seems 
to belong particularly to their world; to the 
world of definite concrete objects which they 
see about them every day, which they can 
handle and play with, and which consequently 
arouse their curiosity. 

The field geography is conducted in much the 
same way. Even the very young children ac- 



AN EXPERIMENT 33 

quire a good idea of the different sorts of rock 
formations, of the action of the wind and rain, 
of river currents, by direct observation ; if text- 
books are used they come afterwards, to explain 
or amplify something the pupils have seen. 
The soil about the school is clay and after a 
rain the smallest stream furnishes excellent ex- 
amples of the ways of rivers, erosions, water- 
sheds, floods, or changing currents, while an ex- 
planation of tides or the Gulf Stream is made 
vital by a little trip to the Bay. A gully near 
the school building not only furnishes a splen- 
did place for play but serves as a text-book in 
mountain ranges, valleys, and soil and rock 
formation. All this serves as an excellent 
foundation and illustration for the descriptive 
geography which comes later. The more ad- 
vanced geography is principally commercial 
geography; and with the scientific background 
that the pupils have already obtained, the real 
significance of the relations between climates 
and crops, industries, exports and imports, and 
social conditions is much more likely to be 
understood. 

The value of handwork is strongly empha- 
sized at Fairhope, consistently with the em- 
phasis put on physical growth. The little child 
must go on learning to coordinate with more and 



34 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

more skill his muscular movements if his body 
is to be developed to the highest standards of 
health and efficiency, and nothing contributes to 
this better than the controlled and rather deli- 
cate motions necessary for making things with 
the hands. The fact that he is making things 
gives just the stimulus the child needs to enable 
him to keep on at the task, to repeat over and 
over the same efforts of mind, hand, and eye, 
to give him real control of himself in the proc- 
ess. The benefits of handwork on the utili- 
tarian side are just as great. The child learns 
how to use the ordinary tools of life, the scis- 
sors, knife, needle, plane, and saw, and gets an 
appreciation of the artists' tools, paint and 
clays, which lasts the rest of his life. If he is 
a child with initiative and inventiveness he finds 
a natural and pleasant outlet for his energies. 
If he is dreamy or unpractical, he learns a re- 
spect for manual work, and gains something to- 
ward becoming a well-rounded human being. 
Boys and girls alike do cooking and carpentry 
work, for the object of the work is not to train 
them for any trade or profession, but to train 
them to be capable, happy members of society. 
Painting or clay modeling play quite as large 
a role, even with the little ones, as carpentry or 
sewing, providing they serve a purpose or are 



AN EXPERIMENT 35 

sufficiently connected with other work to hold 
the pupil's interest. A sense of the beautiful 
is not consciously present in small children and 
must be developed through their handling of 
every-day objects if it is to become a real force 
in their lives. Therefore ''art" is taught as 
part of the handwork, the story telling, the 
dramatization, or the nature study. The young- 
est children in clay modeling, painting, weaving 
paper mats, making paper or wooden toys, etc., 
are asked as much as possible to suggest things 
they want to make. With the acquisition of 
skill, they go on making more and more difficult 
objects ; pupils of nine or ten make raffia baskets, 
boats, and dolls ' furniture. 

The story telling and dramatization are very 
closely connected and (up to the age of about 
ten) take the place of the usual bookwork. 
Stories of literary value, suited in subject mat- 
ter to the age of the pupils, are told or read to 
them, and they in turn are asked to tell stories 
they have heard outside of school. After the 
ninth or tenth year, when the children have 
learned to read, they read stories from books, 
either to themselves or aloud, and then the 
whole class discuss them. The Greek myths, 
the Iliad, and the Odyssey are favorites at this 
age, and very frequently without directions 



36 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

from the teacher, a class will act out a whole 
story, such as the Fall of Troy, or any tale 
that has appealed especially to their dramatic 
imagination. The school believes that this is 
the true way for young people to approach 
literature, if they are to learn to love and ap- 
preciate it, not simply to study the text for 
strange words and figures of speech. The 
pupils are not allowed to use books until the 
eighth or ninth year, and by this time they have 
realized so keenly their need, they beg for help 
in learning. The long, tiresome drill necessary 
for six-year-old children is eliminated. Each 
child is anxious to read some particular book, 
so there is little or no need to trap his attention, 
or to insist on an endless repetition. Mrs. 
Johnson believes also that it is better for the 
natural physical and mental development of 
the child, if learning to write and figure is put 
off as late as possible. Then pupils approach 
it with a consciousness of their real need for 
it, of the help it will be to them in their daily 
life. Their background of knowledge of things 
and skill acquired through handwork renders 
the actual processes of learning comparatively 
simple. Mrs. Johnson is convinced that a child 
who does not learn to read and write in her 
school until he is ten years old, is as well read 



AN EXPERIMENT 37 

at fourteen, and writes and spells as well as a 
child of fourteen in a school where the usual 
curriculum is followed. 

The fundamental conception of number is 
taught orally. The smallest children begin by 
counting one another or the things about them. 
Then perhaps at the blackboard they will divide 
a line in half, then into three parts, then quar- 
ters. By means of objects or lines on the 
blackboard they next begin to add, to subtract, 
to take three-fourths, even to divide. The oral 
drill in this kind of work is constant, and the 
children become thoroughly familiar with the 
fundamental processes of arithmetic, before 
they can write a number or know the meaning 
of the addition or multiplication sign. Then 
when the time comes, at about the age of nine, 
to learn to write numbers, the drill is repeated 
by using the conventional signs instead of lines 
or objects. The school has found that this 
method does away with the usual struggles, 
especially in learning fractions and their 
handling. Long division and the other com- 
plicated processes are taught after the pupils 
can write well and easily, and no emphasis is 
put on formal analysis until repeated drill has 
made the children fairly familiar with, and pro- 
ficient in, the process. Games and contests of 



38 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

all sorts invented by the individual teacher are 
used to make this drill interesting to the pupils. 
Sense culture means the specific training of 
the child's body and muscles to respond ac- 
curately to the desire to perform definite mus- 
cular or other sense acts; or more technically 
it means motor-sensory coordination. Besides 
the general training coming from handwork and 
physical exercise, special games are arranged 
to exercise the different senses. The youngest 
class does relatively most of this sense gym- 
nastic. The whole class sits motionless and in 
absolute silence; some child tiptoes from his 
seat to another part of the room, and then with 
his eyes shut every other child tries to tell 
where he is; or one child says something and 
the others try to guess who it was, by the voice. 
To train the sense of touch, a blindfolded child 
is given some ordinary objects, and by touching 
them tries to recognize them. One of the favor- 
ite games of the whole school was invented to 
train muscular accuracy. Children of different 
ages, divided into groups, throw stones at a large 
tree in the yard. This game has all the zest of 
competition, while teaching the eye and hand 
to work together, and exercising the whole body. 
The unusual physical control of the Fairhope 
pupils is seen best in the carpenter shop, where 



AN EXPERIMENT 39 

even the youngest children work and handle 
full-sized tools, hammers, saws, and planes and 
do not hurt themselves. There is a foot power 
jig-saw in the shop and it is an instructive sight 
to see a child of seven, too small to work the 
pedal, holding his piece of wood,^ turning and 
shaping it in the saw without hurting himself. 

The Fairhope pupils compare favorably with 
pupils in the ordinary public schools. "When 
for any reason they make a change, they have 
always been able to work with other children 
of their age without extra effort; they are apt 
to be stronger physically and are much more 
capable with their hands, while they have a real 
love of books and study that makes them equally 
strong on the purely cultural side of their work. 
The organic curriculum has been worked out in 
detail and in use longest for the younger chil- 
dren, but Mrs. Johnson is convinced the prin- 
ciple of her work will apply equally well to high 
school pupils and is beginning an experiment 
with high school children. Under her direction 
the school has proved a decided success. Time 
and larger opportunities will undoubtedly cor- 
rect the weak spots and discrepancies that are 
bound to appear while any school is in the ex- 
perimental stage. The school has provided 
conditions for wholesome, natural growth in 



40 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

small enough groups for the teacher (as a leader 
rather than an instructor) to become acquainted 
with the weaknesses of each child individually 
and then to adapt the work to the individual 
needs. It has demonstrated that it is possible 
for children to lead the same natural lives in 
school that they lead in good homes outside of 
school hours ; to progress bodily, mentally, and 
morally in school without factitious pressure, 
rewards, examinations, grades, or promotions, 
while they acquire sufficient control of the con- 
ventional tools of learning and of study of books 
— reading, writing, and figuring — to be able to 
use them independently. 



CHAPTER III ; 

FOUR FACTOES IN NATURAL GROWTH 

The Elementary School of the University of 
Missouri, at Columbia, under the direction of 
Prof. J. L. Meriam, has much in common with 
Mrs. Johnson's school at Fairhope. In its 
fundamental idea, that education shall follow 
the natural development of the child, it is 
identical, but its actual organization and opera- 
tion are sufficiently different to make a descrip- 
tion of it suggestive. In common with most 
educational reformers. Professor Meriam be- 
lieves the schools of the past have been too 
much concerned with teaching children adult 
facts. In attempting to systematize and stand- 
ardize, the curriculum has ignored the needs 
of the individual child. He believes that the 
work and play of the school should be children's 
work and play; that the children should enjoy 
school. The life there should be like, only 
better than, the life of the children outside the 
school ; better because they are helped to know 
how to play and work correctly and to do it with 
other children. 

41 



42 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

*'Do cMldren remember how they learned to 
talk? No, but their parents remember for 
them. Yet most of us, both children and adults, 
remember how we struggled in learning to read 
and write at school. We learned to talk simply 
by talking when we were in need or had some- 
thing to say. We learned to say, 'Please, 
Mamma, give me a drink,' when we wanted a 
drink. We did not practice on such words at 
nine o'clock each morning. The pupils in the 
University Elementary School learn to read, 
to write, to draw, and to do other things, just 
when they need to do so. The pupils do in this 
school about what they would do at home, but 
they learn to do it better. They work and play. 
At home they are very active most of the time 
doing many things; and so they are in this 
school. ' ' 

What would these children naturally be doing 
if there were no school? On the answer to this 
question Professor Meriam has based his cur- 
riculum, which contains but one subject that 
appears on the ordinary program; namely, 
handwork. They would, he says, be playing 
outdoors, exercising their bodies by running, 
jumping, or throwing; they would be talking 
together in groups, discussing what they had 
seen or heard; they would be making things to 



FOUR FACTORS 43 

use in their play : boats, bean bags, dolls, ham- 
mocks, or dresses; if they live in the country 
they would be watching animals or plants, mak- 
ing a garden or trying to fish. Every one recog- 
nizes that the child develops quite as much 
through such activities as through what he 
learns in school, and that what he learns 
out of school is much more apt to become 
a part of his working knowledge, because 
it is entirely pleasurable and he recognizes the 
immediate use of it. Again, these occupations 
are all closely connected with the business of 
living; and we send our children to school to 
learn this. What, then, could be more natural 
than making the school's curriculum of such 
material? This is what Professor Meriam 
does. The day is divided into four periods, 
which are devoted to the following elements: 
play, stories, observation, and handwork. For 
the younger children the work is drawn almost 
entirely from the community in which they live ; 
they spend their time finding out more about the 
things they are already familiar with. As they 
grow older their interest naturally reaches out 
to remoter things and to the processes and rea- 
sons back of things; and they begin to study 
history, geography, and science. 

The time of the first three grades is divided 



44 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

in this way: From 9 to 10:30, observation; 
10:30 to 11, physical exercises; from 11 to 12, 
play ; 1 :30 to 3, stories ; and 3 to 4, handwork. 

The observation period is devoted to the 
study of one topic, and this topic may take only 
a single morning or it may take several weeks. 
While there is a general plan for the year's 
work, if the children bring up anything which 
seems of importance to them and which fits in, 
the program is laid aside and the teacher helps 
the pupils in their study of their own problem. 
This might be true of any of the studies of the 
day; the program is flexible, the school aims to 
meet the individual needs of the child and the 
group. The observation periods of the first 
three grades are devoted to a study of flowers, 
trees, and fruits; birds and animals, of the 
weather and the changing seasons, of holidays, 
of the town grocery store, or the neighborhood 
dwellings, and the clothing that the children see 
for sale in the stores. The pupils learn to read 
and write and figure only as they feel the need 
of it to enlarge their work. The nature work 
is taught as much as possible out of doors ; the 
children take walks with the teacher and talk 
about the trees, plants, and animals they meet 
on their way ; they gather tadpoles and fish for 
the school aquarium and pick out a tree to watch 



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FOUR FACTORS 45 

and keep a record of for the whole year. Their 
study of the weather also lasts through the 
whole year; they watch the changing seasons, 
what things look like in the fall and what hap- 
pens as winter begins, what the plants and ani- 
mals do in winter, etc. In this way they watch 
the whole cycle of the year, and learn uncon- 
sciously the relation between their own climate 
and the vegetation and animal life about them. 

The study of their own food, shelter, and 
clothing is concentrated into a consecutive 
period, and as interest and time dictate it is 
added to by a study of some phases of local life 
that are not concerned with the actual necessi- 
ties of life. They learn about their neighbors' 
recreations and pleasures by studying the 
jewelry store and the circus, or the community 
interests of their parents by studying the local 
fire department and post-office. 

The method of study is the same for all work. 
First, with help from the teacher the children 
tell all they know about the subject they are be- 
ginning to study ; if it is food, each child has an 
opportunity to say anything he can think of 
about it; what his own family eats, where the 
food comes from, how it is taken care of, what 
he has noticed in the grocery stores, etc. Then 
the whole class with the teacher make a visit to 



46 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

the grocery store, spend perhaps all the morn- 
ing there, each child trying to see how much he 
can find out for himself. Before they start the 
teacher has called their attention to the fact 
that the things are sold by the quart, etc., for 
the subject of weights and measures seems to be 
of absorbing interest to the children when ap- 
proached from this side. Some first grade chil- 
dren have proved to be remarkably keen detec- 
tives in noticing the grocer's innumerable de- 
vices for making quantities look greater than 
they are. The pupils are also encouraged to 
note and compare prices, and to bring food 
budgets from home whenever their parents are 
willing. When they return to their classroom 
they again discuss what they have seen, and 
those who can write make a list with prices of 
all the articles which they can remember, or 
write an account of their visit, which is dictated 
by the teacher from the oral accounts the chil- 
dren themselves have given of it. 

The pupils who cannot read will draw a pic- 
ture of the grocery store or perhaps have a 
reading lesson in the catalogue the grocer 
has given them. Later they will study 
the way the grocer delivers his goods to his 
patrons, and in a very general way where the 
things come from. They will bring grocers' 



FOUR FACTORS 47 

bills from home, compare tliem, add them up, 
and discuss the question of economical and nu- 
tritious food. Perhaps they will do the same 
thing with the milk and bakery business, before 
moving on to the question of the houses in the 
neighborhood. This and the clothing and 
recreation of the town will be studied in the 
same way. Later the class will visit the fire 
department and the post-office and find out what 
each is for and how they are conducted. This 
and the study of local amusements usually 
come in the third grade. The opportunity for 
the constant use of reading, writing, and arith- 
metic, and for drill in the correct use of spoken 
English, is obvious. Professor Meriam is in- 
sistent upon the fact that this study of the com- 
munity in which the child lives is made for the 
educational value of the work itself to the pupil, 
never as a mere cloak for the teaching of ''the 
three R's," which must be done only as it con- 
tributes directly to the work the children are 
doing. 

The period devoted to games by the first three 
grades is of the same educational value. The 
children are exercising their bodies, learning 
to control them and to make skillful motions 
aimed at some immediate result. Much variety 
and liberty is allowed in this work, and the 



48 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

teacher is only an observer. Most of the games 
the children play are competitive, for they have 
found that the element of skill and chance is 
what the pupils need to make them work hard 
at the games. Bean bags and nine pins are 
favorites; any game, in fact, where they can 
keep score ; the teacher acts as scorekeeper for 
the little children, and when the game is over 
they copy the score in a folder to refer to and 
see how they progress. The better they play, 
the more they enjoy the game ; so they watch the 
best player, studying how he moves and stands, 
and make drawings. The teacher also writes 
on the board some of the things the pupils say 
as they play, and at the end of the game they 
find a reading lesson which they have made 
themselves and which gives an account of their 
game; in copying this into their folders they 
have a writing lesson. The children are allowed 
to talk and laugh as much as they please while 
they are playing, and this is an English lesson. 
Great variety is introduced into the games so 
as to encourage the pupils to talk freely, and 
added stimulus is given by using interesting 
things to play with, bright colored balls, dolls, 
and gaily painted ' ' roly-polys. " The new 
words and phrases the children use are written 
down in the daily account of the game, and in 



FOUR FACTORS 49 

this way their vocabulary is enlarged in a nat- 
ural way. 

The hour devoted to stories is no more a read- 
ing and writing lesson than all the rest of the 
day's work. Children immensely enjoy good 
stories, therefore they ought to be given plenty 
of opportunity to become acquainted with them. 
During this period, the teacher and the children 
tell stories to each other; not stories they have 
studied from their primers, but stories that they 
already know, that they have listened to, or 
read because they enjoyed them. Every child 
likes to be listened to, and they soon discover 
they must tell their story well or they will get 
no audience. Some stories they tell by acting 
them out, others by drawing. Soon they want 
to learn a new group of stories, and then, quite 
naturally, they go to the school library, pick 
out a story book and read. It has been found 
that the first grade pupils read from twelve to 
thirty books during the year ; the second grade 
pupils from twenty-five to fifty. In this way 
they learn to read, to read good books — for 
there is nothing else in the library — and to read 
them well, for they always have the desire to 
find a story to tell to their class, or one that 
they can act. Appreciation of good literature 
begins very early in this way, or rather, it is 



50 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

never lost. Very small children always enjoy 
most the best stories — Mother Goose, Hans 
Andersen, or Kipling's "Just So Stories." 
The dislike of books gained in school turns chil- 
dren from literature to trash. But if children 
are allowed and encouraged to hear, and read, 
and act out these stories in school just as they 
would at home — that is, for the sake of the fun 
there is in it — they will keep their good taste 
and enjoyment of good books. Songs, says 
Professor Meriam, are another sort of story, 
and little children sing for the fun of it, for the 
story of the song; so the singing at this school 
is part of the story work, and the children work 
and learn to sing better, in order to increase 
their enjoyment. 

Children are always clamoring to '*make 
something." Professor Meriam takes this fact 
as suflScient grounds for making handwork a 
regular part of the curriculum and having it 
occupy an hour a day, a period which usually 
seems so short to the pupils that they take their 
work home. The youngest children, boys and 
girls alike, go into the carpenter shop and learn 
to handle tools and to make things : furniture for 
their dolls, a boat, or some present to take 
home. Weaving and sewing interest both boys 
and girls alike and give scope to the young 



FOUR FACTORS 51 

child for beauty and utility, so they do a lot of 
it. The youngest begin usually with dolls' 
hammocks; then they learn to do coarse cross- 
stitching and crocheting. An entire class, es- 
pecially among the youngest children, usually 
make the same thing at the same time, but they 
may suggest what they want to make, and the 
older children are allowed a great deal of lib- 
erty. The work naturally increases in variety 
and complexity as the pupils grow older, and 
as they acquire skill in the handling of tools. 
Some of the fifth and sixth grade boys have 
made excellent pieces of furniture which are in 
constant use in the school. The handwork fur- 
nishes another opportunity for drawing and 
color work, in the making of drawings for pat- 
terns. 

With the fourth grade there is a marked shift 
in the work, due to the widening interests that 
are coming to the child. The day is divided 
then into three periods, which are devoted to 
industries, stories, and handwork. Organized 
games no longer appeal to the pupils ; they want 
their play outdoors, or in the freedom of a big 
gymnasium, where they can play rougher, 
noisier games, and they are big enough to keep 
their own scores in their heads. The ''indus- 
tries" period takes the place of the ''observa- 



52 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

tion" of tlie younger children, and continues the 
same sort of work. The child has learned the 
meaning of the immediate objects he sees about 
him, their relation to himself and his friends, 
and he is ready to go on and enlarge this knowl- 
edge so as to take in the things he cannot see, 
processes and reasons, and relations that em- 
brace the whole community, or more communi- 
ties, and finally the whole world. 

In the same way that the younger children 
study their immediate environment, the fourth 
grade studies the industries that go on in their 
own neighborhood: the shoe factory, the flour 
mill, the work in the wheat and com fields. 
They go on excursions to the factory and farm, 
and their work in the classroom is based on what 
they see on their trips. Their writing and 
composition are the stories of their trips,' 
which they write ; their reading, the books that 
tell about farming or shoemaking; their arith- 
metic the practical problems they find the 
farmer or foreman doing; all done so that it 
will contribute to the pupils' understanding of 
the industry he is studying. Geography too 
comes from these trips. It answers the ques- 
tions : Why do they grow wheat 1 Where will 
it grow best in the neighborhood and why? etc. 
This school happens to be situated in a small 



FOUR FACTORS 53 

town where the industries are chiefly agricul- 
tural, but obviously such a plan could easily be 
adapted to any community by substituting the 
industries that are found in the immediate 
neighborhood. 

In the fifth and sixth years the study of in- 
dustries is continued, but the scope is extended 
to include the principal industries of the world. 
Here, of course, pupils must learn to substitute 
more and more the printed page for their former 
excursions. This includes drill in reading, 
writing, and mathematics, related to earlier 
studies, and also more and more geography. 
The use of the library becomes of great im- 
portance, for the pupils are not given one text- 
book from which they study and recite. Work 
in geography begins with this question : What 
becomes of the things made in this town, which 
we do not use up? The next step is: Where 
else are these same things made, and are they 
made in the same way? What else is made in 
that place and how is it done? Then, where and 
how are the things made that we get from else- 
where! No one text-book could suffice for this 
work, and if it did it would contradict the idea 
of the school that the children should learn by. 
investigation. They must find for themselves 
from among the books in the library the ones 



54 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

that tell about the particular industry they are 
studying. Every child does not read the same 
book, and as far as possible each pupil makes 
some contribution to the discussion. Just as in 
the lower grades, the older pupils all make 
folders where they keep their descriptions of 
the industries and illustrations of machines and 
processes. 

In the seventh and highest grade in the school, 
the study of industries is continued as history ; 
that is, the history of the industries connected 
with clothing, feeding, and housing is taken up. 
The pupils study the history of shelter from the 
first beginnings with a cave or a brush thicket, 
through the tents of the wandering tribes and 
the Greek and Roman house, to the steel sky- 
scraper of to-day. They study the history of 
agriculture and learn to understand the de- 
velopment of the steam reaper and thresher 
from the wooden stick of the savage. The study 
of the industries in these four higher grades in- 
cludes a study of the institutions of government. 
The fourth grade studies the local post-office, 
in the fifth and sixth they study the mail system 
of the United States, and then how letters are 
carried to all parts of the world. The seventh 
grade studies the history of some of these in- 
stitutions. Part of their time during the past 



FOUR FACTORS 55 

year was devoted to finding out how tlie dif- 
ferent peoples of the world have fought their 
battles and organized their armies, first by 
means of reading and then by discussing what 
they had read. Each pupil kept a record of this 
work, writing a short paper on the army of each 
country he studied and illustrating it as he 
cared to. 

The story period of the four highest grades 
continues the work begun in the lower grades. 
Music and art become more and more concen- 
trated into it. The children continue reading 
and discussing what they have read. Each 
pupil keeps a record of the books he reads with 
a short account of the story and reasons why he 
liked it, and these records are kept on a shelf in 
the library where any other pupil can consult 
them for help in his choice of books. Even in 
high school, Professor Meriam does not believe 
in teaching composition for its own sake, nor 
literature by the usual method of analysis. All 
the work of the school is a constant drill in 
English, and by helping the pupils to use and 
write good English during every school hour, 
more is accomplished than by concentrating the 
work into one hour of formal drill. 

The teaching of French and German is also 
considered part of story work. It is a study 



56 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the pupils take for the pleasure they get from 
talking and reading another language; for the 
sake of the literature they will be able to read. 
For this reason it finds its place in the curric- 
ulum among the things that are purely cul- 
tural: for recreation and pleasure. The stud- 
ies that come under the title of ''stories" are 
the only ones where homework is given. The 
children come to school to do their work, and it 
is not fair to ask them to do this same work at 
home as well. They should look forward to 
school as a pleasure, if they are to get the ut- 
most benefit out of it, but if the doing of set 
tasks becomes associated with school work, the 
pupil's interest in his work in school is bound 
to diminish. If, however, some of the school 
work is regarded as appropriate to leisure and 
recreation, it is natural that the children should 
keep on with it out of school hours, in their 
homes. 

The school has been working with this pro- 
gram for eight years, and has about 120 
pupils. The school building has few rooms and 
these are connected with large folding doors. 
At least two and usually three grades work in 
the same room, and the pupils are allowed free- 
dom to move about and talk to each other as 
long as they do not disturb their classmates. 



FOUR FACTORS 57 

One teacher takes charge of an entire room, 
about thirty-five children, divided into several 
groups, each doing a different thing. Indi- 
vidual teachers in some of the neighboring 
country public schools have also followed the 
program through one grade and have found 
that the pupils were all ready for promotion 
at the end of the year and that they did their 
work in the next grade with as much ease as if 
they had followed the usual formal drill. 
Records are being kept of the graduates of the 
elementary school. Most of them go into the 
high school of the university, where there is 
every opportunity to watch them closely. They 
find no unusual difficulty in keeping up with the 
regular college preparatory work, and their 
marks and the age at which they enter college 
indicate that their elementary training has given 
them some advantages over the public school 
pupils in ability to do the hard formal studying. 
Professor Meriam is also director of the high 
school, but has not as yet changed the regular 
college preparatory curriculum, except in the 
English. He expects to do so, however, and 
believes an equally radical reorganization of the 
work will have beneficial results. In the high 
school, English is not taught at all as a sepa- 
rate study, but work on it is continued along 



58 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

the same lines followed in the elementary school. 
A study of a certain number of graduates from 
the university schools and an equal number from 
the town high school, has indicated that the 
pupils who have received none of the usual 
training in English during their high school 
course do better work in their English courses 
in college than those who have followed the 
regular routine. 

Of course, judging an educational experi- 
ment by the pupil's ability to ''keep up" with 
the system the experiment is trying to im- 
prove, is of very little value. The purpose of 
the experiment is not to devise a method by 
which the teacher can teach more to the child 
in the same length of time, or even prepare 
him more pleasantly for his college course. It 
is rather to give the child an education which 
will make him a better, happier, more efficient 
human being, by showing him what his capa- 
bilities are and how he can exercise them, both 
materially and socially, in the world he finds 
about him. If, while a school is still learning 
how best to do this for its pupils, it can at the 
same time give them all they would have gained 
in a more conventional school, we can be sure 
there has been no loss. Any manual skill or 
bodily strength that their schooling has given 





(i) Printing teaches English. (Francis Parker School, 

Chicago.) 

(2) The basis of the year's work. (Indianapolis.) 



FOUR FACTORS 59 

them, or any enjoyment of the tasks of their 
daily life and the best that art and literature has 
to offer, are further definite gains that can be 
immediately seen and measured. All contribute 
to the larger aim, but the lives of all the pupils 
will furnish the only real test of the success or 
failure of any educational experiment that aims 
to help the whole of society by helping the whole 
individual. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE CURRICULUM 

Rousseau, while he was writing his Emile, 
was allowing his own children to grow up en- 
tirely neglected by their parents, abandoned in 
a foundling asylum. It is not strange then that 
his readers and students should center their in- 
terest in his theories, in his general contribution 
to education rather than in his account of the 
impractical methods he used to create that ex- 
emplary prig — Emile. If Rousseau himself 
had ever tried to educate any real children he 
would have found it necessary to crystallize his 
ideas into some more or less fixed program. In 
his anxiety to reach the ideal described in his 
theories, the emphasis of his interest would have 
unconsciously shifted to the methods by which 
he could achieve his ideal in the individual child. 
The child should spend his time on things that 
are suited to his age. The teacher immedi- 
ately asks what these things are ? The child 
should have an opportunity to develop nat- 
urally, mentally, spiritually, and physically. 

60 



KEORGANIZATION 61 

How is the teacher to offer this opportunity and 
what does it consist ml Only in the very sim- 
plest environment where one teacher is work- 
ing out her own theories is it possible to get 
along without a rather definite embodiment of 
the ideal in specific materials and methods. 
Therefore in reviewing some of the modern at- 
tempts at educational reform, we quite nat- 
urally find that emphasis has been put upon the 
curriculum. 

Pestalozzi and Froebel were the two edu- 
cators most zealous in reducing inspiration got 
from Rousseau into the details of schoolroom 
work. They took the vague idea of natural 
development and translated it into formulaB 
which teachers could use from day to day. 
Both were theorists, Froebel by temperament, 
Pestalozzi by necessity; but both made vigorous 
efforts to carry their theories into practice. 
They not only popularized the newer ideas 
about education, but influenced school practice 
more than any other modem educators. 
Pestalozzi substantially created the working 
methods of elementary education; while, as 
everybody knows, Froebel created a new kind 
of school, the kindergarten, for children too 
young to attend regular primary classes. 

This combination of theoretical and practical 



62 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

influence makes it important to discriminate 
between the points where they carried the idea 
of education as growth forward, and the points 
where, in their anxiety to supply a school pro- 
gram to be followed by everybody, they fell 
back upon mechanical and external methods. 
Personally, Pestalozzi was as heroic in life as 
Rousseau was the reverse. Devotion to others 
took with him the place occupied by a senti- 
mental egotism in Rousseau. For this very 
reason, perhaps, he had a firm grasp on a truth 
which Rousseau never perceived. He realized 
that natural development for a rnan means a 
social development, since the individual's vital 
connections are with others even more than 
with nature. In his own words : ' * Nature edu- 
cated man for social relations, and by means of 
social relations. Things are important in the 
education of man in proportion to the intimacies 
of social relations ' into which man enters. ' ' 
For this reason family life is the center of edu- 
cation, and, in a way, furnishes the model for 
every educational institution. In family life 
physical objects, tables, chairs, the trees in the 
orchard, the stones of the fence, have a social 
meaning. They are things which people use 
together and which influence their common ac- 
tions. 



REORGANIZATION 63 

Education in a medium where things have 
social uses is necessary for intellectual as well 
as for moral growth. The more closely and 
more directly the child learns by entering into 
social situations, the more genuine and effective 
is the knowledge he gains. Since power for 
dealing with remoter things comes from power 
gained in managing things close to us, ''the 
direct sense of reality is formed only in narrow 
social circles, like those of family life. True 
human wisdom has for its bedrock an intimate 
knowledge of the immediate environment and 
trained capacity for dealing with it. The 
quality of mind thus engendered is simple and 
clear-sighted, formed by having to do with un- 
compromising realities and hence adapted to 
future situations. It is firm, sensitive and sure 
of itself." 

''The opposite education is scattering and 
confused ; it is superficial, hovering lightly over 
every form of knowledge, without putting any 
of it to use : a medley, wavering and uncertain." 
The moral is plain : Knowledge that is worthy 
of being called knowledge, training of the intel- 
lect that is sure to amount to anything, is ob- 
tained only by participating intimately and ac- 
tively in activities of social life. 

This is Pestalozzi's great positive contribu- 



64 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

tion. It represents an insight gained in his own 
personal experience ; for as an abstract thinker 
he was weak. It not only goes beyond Rous- 
seau, but it puts what is true in Rousseau upon 
a sound basis. It is not, however, an idea that 
lends itself readily to formal statement or to 
methods which can be handed from one to an- 
other. Its significance is illustrated in his own 
early undertaking when he took twenty vaga- 
bond children into his own household and pro- 
ceeded to teach them by means of farm pursuits 
in summer and cotton spinning and weaving 
in the winter, connecting, as far as possible, 
book instruction with these active occupations. 
It was illustrated, again later in his life, when 
he was given charge of a Swiss village, where 
the adults had been practically wiped out for 
resistance to an army of Napoleon. When a 
visitor once remarked: *'Why, this is not a 
school; this is a household," Pestalozzi felt he 
had received his greatest compliment. 

The other side of Pestalozzi is found in his 
more official school teaching career. Herfe also 
he attacked the purely verbal teaching of cur- 
rent elementary education and struggled to sub- 
stitute a natural development. But instead of 
relying upon contact with objects used in active 
social pursuits (like those of the home), he fell 



REORGANIZATION 65 

back upon bare contact with the objects them- 
selves. The result was a shift in Pestalozzi's 
fundamental idea. Presentation of objects by 
the teacher seemed to take the place of growth 
by means of personal activities. He was dimly 
conscious of the inconsistency, and tried to over- 
come it by saying that there are certain fixed 
laws of development which can be abstracted 
from the various experiences of particular hu- 
man beings. Education cannot follow the de- 
velopment going on in individual children at a 
particular time; that would lead to confusion 
and chaos, anarchy and caprice. It must follow 
general laws derived from the individual cases. 

At this point, the emphasis is taken from par- 
ticipation in social uses of things and goes over 
to dependence upon objects. In searching for 
general laws which can be abstracted from par- 
ticular experiences, he found three constant 
things: geometrical form, number, and lan- 
guage — the latter referring, of course, not to 
isolated verbal expressions but to the statement 
of the qualities of things. In this phase of his 
activity as teacher, Pestalozzi was particularly 
zealous in building up schemes of object-lesson 
teaching in which children should learn the 
spatial and numerical relations of things and 
acquire a vocabulary for expressing all their 



66 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

qualities. The notion that object-lessons, by 
means of presentation of things to the senses, is 
the staple of elementary education thus came 
from Pestalozzi. Since it was concerned with 
external things and their presentation to the 
senses, this scheme of education lent itself to 
definite formulation of methods which could be 
passed on, almost mechanically, from one per- 
son to another. 

In developing such methods, Pestalozzi hit 
upon the idea that the ''order of nature" con- 
sists in going from the simple to the complex. 
It became his endeavor to find out in every sub- 
ject the ABC (as he called it) of observation 
in that topic — the simplest elements that can be 
put before the senses. When these were mas- 
tered, the pupils were to pass on to various com- 
plications of these elements. Thus, in learning 
to read, children were to begin with combina- 
tions like A B, E B, I B, B ; then take up the 
reverse combinations B A, BE, B I, BO, etc., 
until having mastered all the elements, they 
could go on to complex syllables and finally to 
words and sentences. Number, music, drawing 
were all taught by starting with simple ele- 
ments which could be put before the senses, and 
then proceeding to build up more complex forms 
in a graded order. 



REORGANIZATION 67 

So great was the vogue of this procedure that 
the very word ''method" was understood by 
many to signify this sort of analysis and com- 
bination of external impressions. To this day, 
it constitutes, with many people, a large part 
of what is understood by ''pedagogy." Pesta- 
lozzi himself called it the psychologizing of 
teaching, and, more accurately, its mechanizing. 
He gives a good statement of his idea in the 
following words: "In the world of nature, im- 
perfection in the bud means imperfect maturity. 
What is imperfect in its germ is crippled in its 
growth. In the development of its component 
parts, this is as true of the growth of the intel- 
lect as of an apple. We must, therefore, take 
care, in order to avoid confusion and super- 
ficiality in education, to make first impressions 
of objects as correct and as complete as possible. 
We must begin with the infant in the cradle, 
and take the training of the race out of the 
hands of blind sportive nature, and bring it 
under the power which the experience of the 
centuries has taught us to abstract from na- 
ture's own processes." 

These sentences might be given a meaning to 
which no one could object. All of the educa- 
tional reformers have rightly insisted upon the 
importance of the first years in which funda- 



68 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

mental attitudes controlling later growth are 
fixed. There can be no doubt that if we could 
regulate the earlier relations of children to the 
world about them so that all ideas gained are 
certain, solid, definite, and right as far as they 
go, we might give children unconscious, intel- 
lectual standards which would operate later on 
with an efficacy quite foreign to our present ex- 
perience. But the certainty and definiteness of 
geometrical forms, and of isolated qualities of 
objects are artificial. Correctness and com- 
pleteness are gained at the expense of isolation 
from the every-day human experience of the 
child. It is possible for a child to learn the 
various properties of squares, rectangles, etc., 
and to acquire their names. But unless the 
squares and rectangles enter into his purpose- 
ful activities he is merely accumulating scho- 
lastic information. Undoubtedly it is better 
that the child should learn the names in asso- 
ciation with the objects than to learn mere 
strings of words. But one is almost as far from 
real development as the other. Both are very 
far from the ''firm, sensitive, and sure knowl- 
edge" which comes from using things for ends 
which appeal to the child. The things that the 
child uses in his household occupations, in gar- 
dening, in caring for animals, in his plays and 



REORGANIZATION 69 

games, have real simplicity and completeness of 
meaning for him. The simplicity of straight 
lines, angles, and quantities put before him just 
to be learned is mechanical and abstract. 

For a long time the practical influence of 
Pestalozzi was confined to expelling from the 
schools reliance upon memorizing words that 
had no connection with things ; to bringing ob- 
ject-lessons into the schools, and to breaking up 
every topic into its elements, or A B C, and 
then going on by graded steps. The failure of 
these methods to supply motives and to give 
real power made many teachers realize that 
things which the child has a use for are really 
simpler and more complete to him, even if he 
doesn't understand everything about them, than 
isolated elements. In the newer type of schools, 
there is a marked return (though of course quite 
independently of any reference to Pestalozzi) 
to his earlier and more vital idea of learning 
by taking a share in occupations and pursuits 
which are like those of daily life and which are 
engaged in by the friends about him. 

Different schools have worked the matter out 
in different ways. In the Montessori schools 
there is still a good deal of effort to control 
the growth of mind by the material presented. 
In others, as in the Fairhope experiment, the 



70 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

material is incidental and informal, and the 
curriculum follows the direct needs of the 
pupils. 

Most schools fall, of course, between these 
two currents. The child must develop, and 
naturally, but society has become so com- 
plicated, its demands upon the child are so im- 
portant and continuous, that a great deal must 
be presented to him. Nature is a very exten- 
sive as well as compact thing in modern life, 
including not only the intricate material en- 
vironment of the child, but social relations as 
well. If the child is to master these he must 
cover a great deal of ground. How is this to 
be done in the best way? Methods and ma- 
terials must be used which are in themselves 
vital enough to represent to the child the whole 
of this compact nature which constitutes his 
world. The child and the curriculum are two 
operative forces, both of them developing and 
reacting on each other. In visiting schools the 
things that are interesting and helpful to the 
average school teacher are the methods, and 
the curriculum, the way the pupils spend their 
time; that is, the way the adjustment between 
the child and his environment is brought about. 
^ "Learning by doing" is a slogan that might 
almost be offered as a general description of 



KEORGANIZATION 71 

the way in which many teachers are trying to 
effect this adjustment. The hardest lesson a 
child has to learn is a practical one, and if he 
fails to learn it no amount of book knowledge 
will make up for it: it is this very problem of 
adjustment with his neighbors and his job. A 
practical method naturally suggests itself as 
the easiest and best way of solving this problem. 
On the face of it, the various studies — arith- 
metic, geography, language, botany, etc. — are in 
themselves experiences. They are the accumu- 
lation of the past of humanity, the result of its 
efforts and successes, for generation after gen- 
eration. The ordinary school studies present 
this not as a mere accumulation, not as a mis- 
cellaneous heap of separate bits of experience, 
but in some organized way. Hence, the daily 
experiences of the child, his life from day to 
day, and the subject matter of the schoolroom, 
are parts of the same thing; they are the first 
and last steps in the life of a people. To oppose 
one to the other is to oppose the infancy and 
maturity of the same growing life; it is to set 
the moving tendency and the final result of the 
same power over against each other; it is to 
hold that the nature and the destiny of the child 
war with each other. 

The studies represent the highest develop- 



J 



72 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

ment possible in the child's simple every-day 
experiences. The task of the school is to take 
these crude experiences and organize them into 
science, geography, arithmetic, or whatever 
the lesson of the hour is. Since what the child 
already knows is part of some one subject that 
the teacher is trying to teach him, the method 
that will take advantage of this experience as 
a foundation stone on which to build the child's 
conscious knowledge of the subject appears as 
the normal and progressive way of teaching. 
And if we can enlarge the child's experience by 
methods which resemble as nearly as possible 
the ways that the child has acquired his begin- 
ning experiences, it is obvious that we have 
made a great gain in the effectiveness of our 
teaching. It is a commonplace that until a 
child goes to school he learns nothing that has 
not some direct bearing on his life. How he 
acquires this knowledge, is the question that 
will furnish the clew for natural school method. 
And the answer is, not by reading books or lis- 
tening to explanations of the nature of fire or 
food, but by burning himself and feeding him- 
self; that is, by doing things. Therefore, says 
the modem teacher, he ought to do things in 
school. 
Education which ignores this vital impulse 



REORGANIZATION 73 

furnislied by the child is apt to be ''academic,'* 
' ' abstract, ' ' in the bad sense of these words. If 
text-books are nsed as the sole material, the 
work is much harder for the teacher, for besides 
teaching everything herself she must constantly 
repress and cut off the impulses of the child to- 
wards action. Teaching becomes an external 
presentation lacking meaning and purpose as 
far as the child is concerned. Facts which are 
not led up to out of something which has pre- 
viously occupied a significant place for its own 
sake in the child's life, are apt to be barren and 
dead. They are hieroglyphs which the pupil is 
required to study and learn while he is in school. 
It is only after the child has learned the same 
fact out of school, in the activities of real life, 
that it begins to mean anything to him. The 
number of isolated facts to which this can hap- 
pen, which appear, say, in a_ge.Qgrap.hyi-i£xt::u f 
book, are necessarily very small. 

For the specialist in any one subject the ma- 
terial is all classified and arranged, but before 
it can be put in a child's text-book it must be 
simplified and greatly reduced in bulk. The 
thought provoking character is obscured and 
the organizing function disappears. The 
child's reasoning powers, the faculty of abstrac- 
tion and generalization, are not adequately 



X 



74 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEEOW 

developed. This does not mean that the text- 
book must disappear, but that its function is 
changed. It becomes a guide for the pupil by 
which he may economize time and mistakes. 
The teacher and the book are no longer the only 
instructors; the hands, the eyes, the ears, in 
fact the whole body, become sources of informa- 
tion, while teacher and text-book become respec- 
tively the starter and the tester. No book or 
map is a substitute for personal experience; 
they cannot take the place of the actual journey. 
The mathematical formula for a falling body 
does not take the place of throwing stones or 
shaking apples from a tree. 

Learning by doing does not, of course, mean 
the substitution of manual occupations or hand- 
work for text-book studjdng. At the same time, 
allowing the pupils to do handwork whenever 
there is opportunity for it, is a great aid in 
holding the child's attention and interest. 

Public School 45 of the Indianapolis school 
system is trying a number of experiments where 
the children may be said to be learning by doing. 
The work done is that required by the state 
curriculum, but the teachers are constantly find- 
ing new ways to prevent the work becoming a 
mere drill in text-book facts, or preparation for 
examinations. In the fifth grade, class activi- 



REORGANIZATION 75 

ties were centered around a bungalow that the 
children were making. The boys in the class 
made the bungalow in their manual training 
hours. But before they started it every pupil 
had drawn a plan to scale of the house, and 
worked out, in their arithmetic period, the 
amount and cost of the lumber they would need, 
both for their own play bungalow and for a full 
sized one; they had done a large number of 
problems taken from the measurements for the 
house, such as finding the floor and wall areas 
and air space of each room, etc. The children 
very soon invented a family for their house 
and decided they would liave them live on a 
farm. The arithmetic work was then based on 
the whole farm. First this was laid out for 
planting, plans were drawn to scale, and from 
information the children themselves gathered 
they made their own problems, basing them on 
their play farm: such as the size of the com 
field, how many bushels of seeds would be 
needed to plant it; how big a crop they could 
expect, and how much profit. The children 
showed great interest and ingenuity in invent- 
ing problems containing the particular arith- 
metical process they were learning and which 
still would fit their farm. They built fences, 
cement sidewalks, a brick wall, did the market- 



76 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEEOW 

ing for the family, sold tlie butter, milk and eggs, 
and took out fire insurance. When they wer^* 
papering the house the number of area prob- 
lems connected with buying, cutting, and fitting 
the paper, were enough to give them all the 
necessary drill in measurement of areas. 

English work centered in much the same way 
around the building of the bungalow and the 
life of its inhabitants. The spelling lessons 
came from the words they were using in con- 
nection with the building, etc. The plans for 
the completed bungalow, a description of the 
house and the furnishings, or the life of the 
family that dwelt in it, furnished inexhaustible 
material for compositions and writing lessons. 
Criticism of these compositions as they were 
read aloud to the class by their authors became 
work in rhetoric; even the grammar work be- 
came more interesting because the sentences 
were about the farm. 

Art lessons were also drawn from the work 
the children were actually doing in building and 
furnishing the house. The pupils were very 
anxious that their house should be beautiful, so 
the color scheme for both the inside and outside 
furnished a number of problems in coloring and 
arrangement. Later they found large oppor- 
tunities for design, in making wallpaper for the 



REORGANIZATION 77 

house, choosing and then decorating curtains 
and upholstery. Each pupil made his own de- 
sign, and then the whole class decided which one 
they wanted to use. The pupils also designed 
and made clay tiles for the bathroom floor and 
wall, and planned and laid out a flower garden. 
The girls designed and made clothes for the doll 
inmates of the house. The whole class en- 
joyed their drawing lessons immensely because 
they drew each other posing as different mem- 
bers of the family in their different occupations 
on the farm. The work of this grade in ex- 
pression consisted principally in dramatizations 
of the life on the farm which the children 
worked out for themselves. Not only were the 
children ''learning by doing" in the sense that 
nearly all the school work centered around ac- 
tivities which had intrinsic meaning and value 
to the pupils, but most of the initiative for the 
work came from the children themselves. They 
made their own number problems; suggested 
the next step in the work on the house; criti- 
cised each other's compositions, and worked out 
their own dramatizations. 

In almost all the grades in the school the 
pupils were conducting the recitations them- 
selves whenever there was an opportunity. One 
pupil took charge of the class, calling on the 



78 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOKROW 

others to recite; the teacher becoming a mere 
observer unless her interference was necessary 
to correct an error or keep the lesson to the 
point. When the class is not actually in charge 
of a pupil, every method is used to have the chil- 
dren do all the work, not to keep all the respon- 
sibility and initiative in the hands of the 
teacher. The pupils are encouraged to ask 
each other questions, to make their objections 
and corrections aloud, and to think out for them- 
selves each problem as it comes up. This is 
not done by giving a class a set lesson in a text- 
book as an introduction to a new problem, but 
by suggesting the problem to the class and by 
means of questions and discussion, helped out 
whenever possible by actual experiments by the 
pupils, trying to bring out the solution of the 
problem, or at the least to give the pupil an 
understanding of what the problem is about be- 
fore he sees it in print. 

The method can be applied to all the class- 
room work, but one illustration taken from a 
geography lesson is especially suggestive. One 
grade was studying the Panama Canal, and had 
great difficulty in understanding the purpose or 
working of the canal, and especially the locks; 
in other words, they were not intellectually in- 
terested in what the teacher told them. She 



REORGANIZATION 79 

changed her method entirely and starting from 
the beginning, asked the class to pretend that 
Japan and the United States were at war, and 
that they were the Government at Washington 
and had to run the army. They at once became 
interested, and discovered that a canal across 
Panama was a necessity if the United States* 
ships were to arrive in the Pacific in time to de- 
fend the coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The 
mountain range seemed an impossible barrier, 
until the locks were explained to them again, 
when they seized the principle. Many of them, 
indeed, became so interested that they made 
models of locks at home to bring to schooL 
They used the map freely and accurately in their 
interest in saving the country from invasion, 
but until one pupil asked why the United States 
did not actually build a canal across the Isth- 
mus, they did not notice that their exciting game 
had anything to do with the puzzling facts that 
they had previously been trying to memorize 
from their text-book. 

The teachers in the school make use of any 
illustrations from the practical life about them 
that fit in well with the work the grade is doing. 
Thus the third grade set up a parcel post sys- 
tem in their classroom, basing aU their English 
and arithmetic work on it for some time, and 



80 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

learning to use a map and scales and weights as 
well. A retail shoe store gave the first grade 
plenty of work and fun, and games and dances 
with little songs have proved a great help in 
their number work. Most of the furniture in 
the school office was made by the big boys in 
their shop work, and several of the rooms are 
decorated with stencil designs the pupils made 
in their art lessons. The number work of the 
whole school is taught from the concrete side. 
The little children have boxes of tooth-picks and 
paper counters, which they use for adding and 
subtracting ; the older pupils may tear paper or 
draw squares when they are learning a new 
process. The class is given something to do 
which illustrates the process to be taught ; then 
the children themselves analyze what they have 
done and, as the last step, they do examples 
with pure numbers. 

Many of the public schools of Chicago are also 
trying in every way possible to vitalize their 
work ; to introduce into the curriculum material 
which the children themselves can handle and 
from which they may get their own lessons. 
This work is fitted into the regular curriculum ; 
it is not dependent on any peculiarities of an 
individual teacher, but may be introduced 
throughout the entire system, just as text-books 



REOEGANIZATION 81 

are now uniform througli a large number of 
schools. The work has been applied principally 
in history and civics for the younger grades, 
but it is easy to imagine how the same sort of 
thing could be used in geography or some of 
the other subjects. The history in the younger 
grades is taught largely by means of sand 
tables. The children are perhaps studying the 
primitive methods of building houses, and on 
their sand table they build a brush house, a 
cave dwelling, a tree house, or an eskimo snow 
hut. The children themselves do all the work. 
The teacher steps in with advice and help only 
when necessary to prevent real errors, but the 
pupils are given the problem of the manufac- 
ture of the house they are studying, and are ex- 
pected to solve it for themselves. Sand tables 
are used in the same way by a third grade in 
their study of the early history of Chicago. 
They mold the sand into a rough relief map of 
the neighborhood and then with twigs build the 
forts and log cabins of the first frontier settle- 
ment, with an Indian encampment just outside 
the stockade. They put real water in their lake 
and river, and float canoes in it. Other grades 
do the same thing with the history of trans- 
portation among the first settlers in this coun- 
try, and with the logging and lumber industry. 



82 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

The older grades are studying the government 
of their city, and make sand tables to illustrate 
the different departments of city government. 
One room has a life-saving station, with dif- 
ferent types of boats, and life lines that work. 
Others have the telephone, mail carrier, and 
parcel posts systems, and a system of street 
cleaning of which the children are particularly 
proud, because they have copied conditions 
which they actually found in some of the alleys 
near the school buildings. Beside the alleys 
which were dirty, like those in the neighbor- 
hood, they have constructed a model alley with 
sanitary garbage appliances made on the best 
plane based on what the teacher has told 
them about systems in other cities. 

In another building all the pupils above the 
fourth grade have organized into civic clubs. 
They divided the school district into smaller 
districts and one club took charge of each dis- 
trict, making surveys and maps of their own 
territory, counting lamp posts, alleys, and garb- 
age cans, and the number of policemen, or going 
intensively into the one thing which interested 
them most. Then each club decided what they 
wanted to do for their own district and set out 
to accomplish it, whether it was the cleaning up 
of a bad alley or the better lighting of a street. 



EEORGANIZATION 83 

They used all the methods that an adult citi- 
zens' club would employ, writing letters to the 
city departments, calling at the City Hall, and 
besides actually went into the alleys and cleaned 
them up. The interest and enthusiasm of the 
pupils in this work was remarkable and they are 
now undertaking a campaign to get a play- 
ground for the school, by means of advertising 
and holding neighborhood meetings. The Eng- 
lish work in these grades is based on the work 
of the clubs ; the pupils keep track of the work 
they do, make maps and write letters. 

Most of the hand and industrial work, which 
is not taught for strictly vocational purposes 
illustrates the principles which "learning by 
doing" stand for. Examples of this are to be 
found in nearly all schools to-day which aim to 
be progressive. Many school systems all over 
the country have tried having a printing press 
operated by pupils with great success. The 
presses were installed not to teach the pupils the 
different processes in the trade, but so that the 
children might themselves print some of the 
pamphlets, posters, or other papers that any 
school is constantly needing. Besides the in- 
terest that the pupils have shown in setting up 
the type, operating the presses,, and getting out 
the printed matter, the work has proved itself 



84 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOKEOW 

especially valuable in the teaching of English. 
Type setting is an excellent method of drilling 
in spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and 
grammar, for the fact that the copy is going to 
be printed furnishes a motive for eliminating 
mistakes which exercises written by a pupil for 
his teacher never provides. Proofreading is 
another exercise of the same sort. In such 
schools the press publishes practically all the 
printed matter that is needed during the year, 
including spelling lists, programs, and school 
papers. 

Schools are trying all sorts of experiments to 
make the work in English concrete. The text- 
book method of teaching — learning rules and 
definitions and then doing exercises in their 
application — has proved unsuccessful. Every 
teacher is familiar with the story of the boy 
who wrote, '*I have gone," on a piece of paper 
fifty times, in order to impress the correct form 
on his mind, and then on the bottom of the page 
left a note for the teacher beginning, **I have 
went home. ' ' A purpose in English work seems 
absolutely necessary, for the child sees no gain 
in efficiency in the things he is most interested 
in due to progress in isolated grammar or spell- 
ing. When the progress is brought about as 
a by-product of the scholars' other work the 



REORGANIZATION 85 

case is quite otherwise. Give him a reason for 
writing, for spelling, punctuating, and para- 
graphing, for using his verbs correctly, and im- 
provement becomes a natural demand of ex- 
perience. Mr. Wirt in the Gary, Ind., schools 
has found this so true that the regular Eng- 
lish required by the state curriculum has been 
supplemented by '^application periods in Eng- 
lish. ' ' In these hours the class in carpentry or 
cooking discusses the English used in doing 
their work in those subjects, ^nd corrects from 
the language point of view any written work 
done as part of their other activity. A pupil 
in one of these classes, who had been corrected 
for a mistake in grammar, was overheard say- 
ing, ''Well, why didn't they tell us that in Eng- 
lish?" to which her neighbor answered, "They 
did, but we didn't know what they were talking 
about. ' ' 

In some schools as in the Francis Parker 
School, Chicago, and in the Cottage School at 
Riverside, 111., English is not taught as a sepa- 
rate subject to the younger grades, but the 
pupils have compositions to write for their 
history lessons, keep records of their excur- 
sions, and of other work where they do not use 
text-books. The emphasis is put on helping the 
child to express his ideas ; but such work affords 



86 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

ample opportunity for the drill in the required 
mechanics of writing. Grammar no longer ap- 
pears as a separate subject in the Chicago 
public school curriculum; the teacher gives a 
lesson in grammar every time any one in the 
classroom talks and with every written exer- 
cise. 

However, grammar can be given a purpose 
and made interesting even to eleven-year-old 
children, if the pupils are helped to make their 
own grammar and rules by doing their own 
analyzing as the first step instead of the last. 
This is being done with great success in the 
Phoebe Thorn Experimental School of Bryn 
Mawr College. Grammar had no place on the 
curriculum, but the pupils asked so many ques- 
tions that their teacher decided to let them dis- 
cover their own grammatical rules, starting 
from the questions they had asked. A few 
minutes were taken from the English hour two 
or three times a week for their lessons. At the 
end of three months the class could analyze any 
simple sentence, could tell a transitive from an 
intransitive verb instantly, and were thoroughly 
familiar with the rules governing the verb to 
be. The grammar lesson was one of the favor- 
ite lessons ; the teacher and pupils together had 
invented a number of games to help their drill. 




a. 

v 
H 



REORGANIZATION 87 

For example, one child had a slip of paper 
pinned to her back describing a sentence in 
grammatical terms ; the class made sentences 
that fitted the sentence, and the first pupil had 
to guess what her paper said. No text book 
was used in the work, and the teacher started 
with the sentence, called it a town, and by dis- 
cussion helped the pupils to divide it up into 
districts — singular, plural, etc. Starting from 
this, they developed other grammatical rules. 
The general tendency in the progressive schools 
to-day, nevertheless, seems to be toward the 
elimination of the separate study of grammar, 
and toward making it and the remainder of the 
English work (with the exception of literature) 
a part of other subjects which the class is study- 
ing. 

The motto of the boys' school at Interlaken, 
Ind., *'To teach boys to live," is another way 
of saying, ''learning by doing." Here this is 
accomplished, not so much by special devices 
to render the curriculum more vital and con- 
crete, and by the abolition of text-books with 
the old-fashioned reservoir and pump relation 
of pupil and teacher, as by giving the boys an 
environment which is full of interesting things 
that need to be done. 

The school buildings have been built by the 



88 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

pupils, including four or five big log* structures, 
the plans being drawn, the foundations dug and 
laid, and the carpentry and painting on the 
building done by boy labor. The electric light 
and heating plant is run by the boys, and all 
the wiring and bulbs were put in and are kept 
in repair by them. There is a six hundred acre 
farm, with a dairy, a piggery and hennery, and 
crops to be sowed and gathered. Nearly all this 
work is also done by pupils ; the big boys driv- 
ing the reapers and binders and the little boys 
going along to see how it is done. The inside 
of the houses are taken care of in the same way 
by the students. Each boy looks after his own 
room, and the work in the corridors and school- 
rooms is attended to by changing shifts. There 
is a lake for swimming and canoeing, and plenty 
of time for the conventional athletics. Most of 
the boys are preparing for college, but this out- 
door and manual work does not mean that they 
have to take any longer for their preparation 
than the boy in the city high school. 

The school has also bought the local news- 
paper from the neighboring village and edits 
and prints a four-page weekly paper of local 
and school news. The boys gather the news, 
do much of the writing and all of the editing 
and printing, and are the business managers, 



REORGANIZATION 89 

getting advertisements and tending to tlie sub- 
scription list. The instructors in the English 
department give the boys any needed assis- 
tance. They do all these things, not because 
they want to know certain processes that will 
help them earn a living after they are through 
school, but because to use tools, to move from 
one kind of work to another, to meet different 
kinds of problems, to exercise outdoors, and 
to learn to supply one's daily needs are edu- 
cating influences, which develop skill, initiative, 
independence, and bodily strength — in a word, 
character and knowledge. 
/^ Work in nature study is undergoing reorgan- 
ization in many schools in all parts of the coun- 
try. The attempt is to vitalize the work, so 
that pupils shall actually get a feeling for plants 
and animals, together with some real scientific 
knowledge, not simply the rather sentimental 
descriptions and rhapsodizings of literature. 
It is also different from the information gath- 
ering type of nature study, which is no more 
real science than is the literary type. Here 
the pupils are taught a large number of iso- 
lated facts, starting from material that the 
teacher gathers in a more or less miscellaneous 
way; they learn all about one object after an- 
other, each one unrelated to the others or to any 



90 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

general plan of work. Even though a child 
has gone over a large number of facts about 
the outdoor world, he gains little or nothing 
which makes nature itself more real or more 
understandable. 

■^ If nature study is turned into a science, the 
real material of the subject must be at hand for 
the students; there must be a laboratory, with 
provision for experimentation and observation. 
In the country this is easy, for nature is just 
outside the school doors and windows. The 
work can be organized in the complete way that 
has already been described in the schools at 
Fairhope and Columbia. 

The Cottage School at Riverside, 111., and 
the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich, 
Conn., both put a great deal of stress on their 
nature study work. At the former, the chil- 
dren have a garden where they plant early and 
late vegetables, so that they can use them for 
their cooking class in the spring and fall; the 
pupils do all the work here, plant, weed, and 
gather the things. Even more important is 
the work they do with animals. They have, 
for example, a rare bird that is as much a per- 
sonality in the school life as any of the chil- 
dren, and the children, having cared for him 
and watched his growth and habits, have be- 



REORGANIZATION 91 

come mucli more interested in wild birds. In 
the backyard is a goat, the best liked thing on 
the place, which the children have raised from 
a little kid; and they still do all the work of 
caring for him. They are encouraged in every 
way to watch and report on the school pets and 
also on the animals they find in the woods. 

In the Little School in the Woods at Green- 
wich outdoor work is the basis of the whole 
school organization. Nature study plays a 
large part in this. Groups of pupils take long 
walks through the woods in all seasons and 
weathers, learning the trees in all their dresses, 
and the flowers which come with each season. 
They learn to know the birds and their habits ; 
they study insects in the same way, and learn 
about the stars. In fact, so much of their time 
is spent out of doors, that the pupils acquire 
first hand a large fund of knowledge of the world 
of nature in all its phases. The basis of this 
work, the director of the school calls Woodcraft ; 
he believes that experience in the things the 
woodman does — riding, hunting, camping, 
scouting, mountaineering, Indian-craft, boat- 
ing, etc. — will make strong, healthy, and inde- 
pendent young people with well developed char- 
acters and a true sense of the beauty of nature. 
The nature study then is a part of this other 



92 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

training. A teacher is always with the pupils, 
whether they are boating, walking, or garden- 
ing, to explain what they are doing and why, 
and to call their attention to the things about 
them. There is no doubt that the children in 
the school, even the very little ones, have a 
knowledge and appreciation of nature which 
are very rare even among country children. 
'^ Nature study in the big city, where the only 
plants are in parks and formal yards and where 
the only animals are the delivery horse and the 
alley cat, offers a very different problem. The 
teacher may well be puzzled as to the best way 
to teach her pupils to love nature when they 
never see it; or be doubtful as to the value of 
trying to develop powers of observation when 
the things which they are asked to observe not 
only do not play any part in the lives of the 
pupils but are in quite artificial surroundings. 
Yet while wild nature, the world of woods and 
fields and streams, is almost meaningless to the 
city bred child, there is plenty of material avail- 
able to make nature a very real thing even for 
the child who has never seen a tree or cow. The 
modern teacher takes as a starting point any- 
thing that is familiar to the class; a caged 
canary, a bowl of gold fish, or the dusty trees 
on the playground, and starting from these she 



REORGANIZATION 93 

introduces the children to more and more of na- 
ture, until they can really get some idea of ' ' the 
country" and the part it plays in the lives of 
every one. The vegetable garden is the obvious 
starting point for most city children; if they 
do not have tiny gardens in their own back- 
yards, there is a neighbor who has, or they are 
interested to find out where the vegetables they 
eat come from and how they are grown. 

Both in Indianapolis and Chicago, the public 
schools realize the value of this sort of work for 
the children. In Indianapolis, gardening is a 
regular department in the seventh and eighth 
grades and the high school. The city has 
bought a large tract of land far enough in town 
to be accessible, and any child who cannot have 
a garden at home may, by asking, have a garden 
plot together with lessons in the theory and 
practice of gardening. The plots are large 
enough for the pupils to gain considerable ex- 
perience and to put into practice what they 
learn in the classroom. Both boys and girls 
have the gardens, and are given credit for work 
in them just as for other work. All through 
the school system every attempt is made to 
arouse an interest in gardening. From the first 
grade on, statistics are kept of the numbers of 
children with gardens at home, whether they 



94 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

are vegetable or flower gardens, and what is 
grown. Seeds are given to the children who 
wish to grow new things, and the child is sup- 
posed to account to his grade for the use he has 
made of his garden. 

This work has become a matter of course in 
many rural districts ; every one is familiar with 
the ''corn clubs" among the school children of 
the South and West, and the splendid example 
they have set the farmers as to the possibilities 
of the soil. In many small towns seeds are 
given to the children who want gardens, and in 
the fall a competitive flower and vegetable show 
is held, where prizes are given, as a means of 
keeping track of the work and arousing com- 
munity interest. It is true that most of these 
efforts have been grafted on to the schools by 
the local agricultural interests, in an effort to 
improve the crops and so increase the wealth of 
the neighborhood; but local school boards are 
beginning to take the work over, and it is no 
less real nature study work because of its utili- 
tarian color. It may be made a means of mak- 
ing a real science of nature study; in no way 
does it hinder the teaching of the beauty and 
usefulness of nature, which was the object of 
the old-fashioned study. In fact, it is the 
strongest weapon the school can make use of 



EEORGANIZATION 95 

for this purpose. Every one, and children espe- 
cially, enjoy and respect most the things about 
which their fund of knowledge is largest. The 
true value of anything is most apparent to the 
person who knows something about it. Fa- 
miliarity with growing things and with the 
science of getting food supplies for a people, 
cannot fail to be a big influence towards habits 
of industry and observation, for only the gar- 
dener who watches all the stages and conditions 
of his garden, seeking constantly for causes, 
will be successful. Added to this is the purely 
economic value of having our young people 
grow up with a real respect for the farmer and 
his work, a respect which should counteract that 
overwhelming flow of population toward con- 
gested cities. 

The work in the Chicago public schools has 
not been organized as it is in Indianapolis, but 
in some districts of the city a great deal of em- 
phasis is put on nature study work through gar- 
dens. Many of the schools have school gardens 
where all the children get an opportunity to do 
real gardening, these gardens being used as the 
basis for the nature study work, and the chil- 
dren getting instruction in scientific gardening 
besides. The work is given a civic turn; that 
is to say, the value of the gardens to the child 



96 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

and to the neighborhood is demonstrated: to 
the child as a means of making money or help- 
ing his family by supplying them with vegeta- 
bles, to the community in showing how gardens 
are a means of cleaning up and beautifying the 
neighborhood. If the residents want their 
backyards and empty lots for gardens, they are 
not going to throw rubbish into them or let other 
people do so. Especially in the streets around 
one school has this work made a difference. 
Starting with the interest and effort of the chil- 
dren, the whole community has become tre- 
mendously interested in starting gardens, using 
every bit of available ground. The district is 
a poor one and, besides transforming the yards, 
the gardens have been a real economic help to 
the people. With the help of one school a group 
of adults in the district hired quite a large tract 
of land outside the city and started truck gar- 
dens. The experiment was a great success. 
Inexperienced city dwellers, by taking advan- 
tage of the opportunities for instruction which 
the school could offer, were able to plan and do 
the work and make the garden a success from 
the start. The advantage to the school was just 
as great, for a large group of foreign parents 
came into close touch with it, discovered that 
it was a real force in the neighborhood, and that 



KEORGANIZATION 97 

they could cooperate with it. This element of 
the population usually stands quite aloof from 
the school its children go to, through timidity 
and ignorance, or simply through feeling that it 
is an institution above them. 

The impetus to ''civic nature study" in Chi- 
cago, aside from the district just described, has 
come largely from the Chicago Teachers' Col- 
lege, where the teacher of biology has devoted 
himself especially to working out this problem. 
In addition to the familiar gardening work, 
with especial attention to the organization of 
truck gardening, plants are grown in the class- 
room for purposes of developing appreciation 
of beauty, scientific illustration, and assistance 
in geography. But plants are selected with 
special reference to local conditions, and with 
the des:re to furnish a stimulus to beautifying 
the pupils' own environment. For it is found 
that the scientific principles of botany can be 
taught by means of growing plants which are 
adapted to home use as well as by specimens 
selected on abstract scientific grounds. By 
making a special study of the parks, play- 
grounds, and yards of their surroundings, the 
children learn what can be done to beautify 
their city, and secure an added practical motive 
for acquiring information. They keep pets in 



98 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the schoolroom, such as white mice, fish, birds, 
and rabbits. While these are utilized, of 
course, for illustrating principles of animal 
structure and physiology, they are also em- 
ployed to teach humaneness to animals and a 
general sympathy for animal life. This is 
easy, for children are naturally even more in- 
terested in animals than in plants, and the ani- 
mals become real individualities to the children 
whose needs are to be respected. As the effect 
of conditions upon the health and vigor of their 
pets is noted, there is a natural growth of in- 
terest in questions of personal hygiene. 

It will be observed that while nature study is 
used to instill the elements of science, its chief 
uses are to cultivate a sympathetic understand- 
ing of the place of plants and animals in life 
and to develop emotional and aesthetic interest. 
In the larger cities the situation is very dif- 
ferent from that of rural life and the country 
village. There are thousands of children who 
believe that cement and bricks are the natural 
covering of the ground, trees and grass being 
to them the unusual and artificial thing. Their 
thoughts do not go beyond the fact that milk and 
butter and eggs come from the store; cows and 
chickens are unknown to them — so much so 
that in a recent reunion of old settlers in a con- 



EEORGANIZATION 99 

gested district of New York one of the greatest 
curiosities was a live cow imported from the 
country. Under such circumstances, it is diffi- 
cult to make the scientific problems of nature 
study of vital interest. There are no situations 
of the children's experience into which the facts 
and principles enter as a matter of course. 
Even the weather is tempered and the course of 
the changing seasons has no special effect upon 
the lives of the pupils, save upon the need for 
greater warmth in winter. Nature study in the 
city is like one of the fine arts, such as painting 
or music; its value is aesthetic rather than 
directly practical. Nature is such a small fac- 
tor in the activities of the children that it is 
hard to give it much ''disciplinary" value, save 
as it is turned to civic ends. A vague feeling 
for this state of affairs probably accounts for 
much of the haphazard and half-hearted nature 
study teaching which goes on in city schools. 
There is a serious problem in finding material 
for city children which will do for observation 
what the facts of nature accomplish in the case 
of rural children. 

A valuable experiment with this end in view 
is carried on in the little ''Play School" taught 
by Miss Pratt in one of the most congested dis- 
tricts of New York City. Nature study is not 



100 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEEOW 

taught at all to these little children. If they go 
to the park or have pets and plant flowers it is 
because these things make good play material, 
because they are beautiful and interesting; if 
the children ask questions and want to know 
more about them, so much the better. Instead 
of telling them about leaves and grass, cows and 
butterflies, and hunting out the rare opportuni- 
ties for the children to observe them, use is 
made of the multitudes of things which the chil- 
dren see about them in the streets and in their 
homes. The new building going up across the 
street furnishes just as much for observation 
and questioning as does the park, and is a much 
more familiar sight to the children. They find 
out how the men get the bricks and mortar to 
the upper floors ; they see the sand cart unload- 
ing; possibly one child knows that the driver 
has been to the river to get the sand from a 
boat. They notice the delivery man going 
through the streets, and find out where he got 
the bread to take to their mothers. They see 
the children on the playground and learn that 
besides the fun they have, the playing is good 
for their bodies. They walk to the river and 
see the ferries carrying people back and forth 
and the coal barges unloading. All these facts 
are more closely related to them than the 



REORGANIZATION 101 

things of country life ; hence it is more impor- 
tant that they understand their meaning and 
their relation to their own lives, while acuteness 
of observation is just as well trained. Such 
work is also equally valuable as a foundation 
for the science and geography the pupils will 
study later on. Besides awakening their curi- 
osity and faculties of observation, it shows 
them the elements of the social world, which the 
later studies are meant to explain. 

The Elementary School at Columbia, Mis- 
souri, has arranged its curriculum according to 
the same principle. All the material from na- 
ture which the children use and study they find 
near the school or their homes, and their study 
of the seasons and the weather is made from day 
to day, as the Columbia weather and seasons 
change. Even more important is the work the 
children do in studying their own town, their 
food, clothing, and houses, so that the basis of 
the study is not instruction given by the teacher 
but what the children themselves have been able 
to find out on excursions and by keeping their 
eyes open. The material bears a relation to 
their own lives, and so is the more available for 
teaching children how to live. The reasons for 
teaching such things to the city bred child are 
the same as those for teaching the country child 



102 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the elements of gardening and the possibilities 
of the local soil. By understanding his own 
environment child or adult learns the measure 
of the beauty and order about him, and respect 
for real achievement, while he is laying the 
foundations for his own control of the environ- 
ment. 



CHAPTER V 

PLAY 

At.t. peoples at all times have depended upon 
plays and games for a large part of the educa- 
tion of children, especially of young children. 
Play is so spontaneous and inevitable that few 
educational writers have accorded to it in theory 
the place it held in practice, or have tried to 
find out whether the natural play activities of 
children afforded suggestions that could be 
adopted within school walls. Plato among the 
ancients and Froebel among the moderns are 
the two great exceptions. From both Rousseau 
and Pestalozzi, Froebel learned the principle of 
education as a natural development. Unlike 
both of these men, however, he loved intellec- 
tual system and had a penchant for a somewhat 
mystical metaphysics. Accordingly we find in 
both his theory and practice something of the 
same inconsistency noted in Pestalozzi. 

It is easier to say natural development than 
to find ways for assuring it. There is much 
that is "natural" in children which is also nat- 

103 



104 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

urally obnoxious to adults. There are many 
manifestations which do not seem to have any 
part in helping on growth. Impatient desire 
for a method which would cover the whole 
ground, and be final so as to be capable of use 
by any teacher, led Froebel, as it has led so 
many others, into working out alleged '^aws" 
of development which were to be followed irre- 
spective of the varying circumstances and ex- 
periences of different children. The orthodox 
kindergarten, which has often been more Froe- 
bellian than Froebel himself, followed these 
laws ; but now we find attempts to return to the 
spirit of his teaching, with more or less radical 
changes in its letter. 

While Froebel 's own sympathy with children 
and his personal experience led him to empha- 
size the instinctive expressions of child-life, his 
philosophy led him to believe that natural de- 
velopment consisted in the untolding of an ab- 
solute and universal principle already enfolded 
in the child. He believed also that there is an 
exact correspondence between the general 
properties of external objects and the unfold- 
ing qualities of mind, since both were mani- 
festations of the same absolute reality. Two 
practical consequences followed which often 
got the upper hand of his interest in children 



PLAY 105 

on their own account. One was that, since the 
law of development could be laid down in gen- 
eral, it is not after all so important to study 
children in the concrete to find out what natural 
development consists in. If they vary from the 
requirements of the universal law so much the 
worse for them, not for the ''law." Teachers 
were supposed to have the complete formula of 
development already in their hands. The other 
consequence was that the presentation and 
handling, according to prescribed formulae, of 
external material, became the method in detail 
of securing proper development. Since the gen- 
eral relations of these objects, especially the 
mathematical ones, were manifestations of the 
universal principle behind development, they 
formed the best means of bringing out the hid- 
den existence of the same principle in the child. 
Even the spontaneous plays of children were 
thought to be educative not because of what they 
are, directly in themselves, but because they 
symbolize some law of universal being. Chil- 
dren should gather, for example, in a circle, not 
because a circular grouping is convenient for 
social and practical purposes, but because the 
circle is a symbol of infinity which will tend to 
evoke the infinite latent in the child's soul. 
The efforts to return to Froebel's spirit re- 



106 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW- 

ferred to above have tried to keep the best in 
his contributions. His emphasis upon play, 
dramatization, songs and story telling, which 
involve the constructive use of material, his 
deep sense of the importance of social relations 
among the children — these things are permanent 
contributions which they retain. But they are 
trying with the help of the advances of psycho- 
logical knowledge since FroebePs time and of 
the changes in social occupations which have 
taken place to utilize these factors directly, 
rather than indirectly, through translation into 
a metaphysics, which, even if true, is highly ab- 
stract. In another respect they are returning 
to Froebel himself, against an alteration in his 
ideas introduced by many of his disciples. 
These followers have set up a sharp contrast 
between play and useful activity or work, and 
this has rendered the practices of their kinder- 
gartens more symbolic and sentimental than 
they otherwise would have been. Froebel him- 
self emphasized the desirability of children 
sharing in social occupations quite as much as 
did Pestalozzi — ^whose school he had visited. 
He says, for example, ''The young, growing 
human being should be trained early for outer 
work, for creative and productive activities. 
Lessons through and by work, through and from 



PLAY 107 

life, are the most impressive and the most in- 
telligible, the most continuous and progressive, 
in themselves and in their effect upon the 
learner. Every child, boy and youth, whatever 
his position and condition in life, should devote, 
say, at least one or two hours a day to some 
serious active occupation constructing some 
definite external piece of work. It would be 
a most wholesome arrangement in school to es- 
tablish actual working hours similar to existing 
study hours, and it will surely come to this." 
In the last sentence, Froebel showed himself a 
true prophet of what has been accomplished in 
some of the schools such as we are dealing with 
in this book. 

Schools all over the country are at present 
making use of the child's instinct for play, by 
using organized games, toy making, or other 
construction based on play motives as part of 
the regular curriculum. This is in line with the 
vitalization of the curriculum that is going on 
in the higher grades by making use of the en- 
vironment of the child outside the schoolroom. 
If the most telling lessons can be given children 
through bringing into the school their occupa- 
tions in their free hours, it is only natural to 
use play as a large share of the work for the 
youngest pupils. Certainly the greatest part of 



108 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

the lives of very young children is spent in play- 
ing, either games which they learn from older 
children or those of their own invention. The 
latter usually take the form of imitations of 
the occupations of their elders. All little chil- 
dren think of playing house, doctor, or soldier, 
even if they are not given toys which suggest 
these games; indeed, half of the joy of playing 
comes from finding and making the necessary 
things. The educational value of this play is 
obvious. It teaches the children about the 
world they live in. The more they play the 
more elaborate becomes their paraphernalia, 
the whole game being a fairly accurate picture 
of the daily life of their parents in its setting, 
clothed in the language and bearing of the chil- 
dren. Through their games they learn about 
the work and play of the grown-up world. Be- 
sides noticing the elements which make up this 
world, they find out a good deal about the ac- 
tions and processes that are necessary to keep 
it going. 

While this is of real value in teaching the 
child how to live, it is evident as well that it 
supplies a strong influence against change. 
Imitative plays tend, by the training of habit 
and the turn they give to the child's attention 
and thoughts, to make his life a replica of the 






m 








(i) MaMng a town, instead of doing gymnastic exercises. 

(Teachers College Playground, N. Y. City.) 

(2) Gymnasium dances in sewing-class costumes. 

(Rowland School, Chicago.) 



PLAT 109 

life of his parents. In playing house children 
are just as apt to copy the coarseness, blunders, 
and prejudices of their elders as the things 
which are best. In playing, they notice more 
carefully and thus fix in their memory and 
habits, more than if they simply lived it in- 
differently, the whole color of the life around 
them. Therefore, while imitative games are of 
great educational value in the way of teaching 
the child to notice his environment and some of 
the processes that are necessary for keeping it 
going, if the environment is not good the child 
learns bad habits and wrong ways of thinking 
and judging, ways which are all the harder to 
break because he has fixed them by living them 
out in his play. 

Modern kindergartens are beginning to realize 
this more and more. They are using play, the 
sort of games they find the children playing out- 
side of school hours, not only as a method of 
making work interesting to the children, but 
for the educational value of the activities it in- 
volves, and for giving the children the right sort 
of ideals and ideas about every day life. Chil- 
dren who play house and similar games in 
school, and have toys to play with and the ma- 
terial to make the things they need in their 
play, will play house at home the way they 



110 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEEOW 

played it in school. They will forget to imitate 
the loud and coarse things they see at home, 
their attention will be centered on problems 
which were designed by the school to teach bet- 
ter aims and methods. 

The kindergarten of the Teachers' College 
of Columbia University could hardly be recog- 
nized as a kindergarten at all by a visitor who 
was thinking of the mechanism of instruction 
worked out by Froebel's disciples. The kinder- 
garten is part of the training school of the uni- 
versity, and from the start has been considered 
as a real part of the school system, as the first 
step in an education, not as a more or less un- 
necessary ''extra." With a view to laying a 
permanent basis for higher education, the au- 
thorities have been developing a curriculum 
that should make use of whatever was of real 
worth in existing systems of education and in 
the experiments tried by themselves. To find 
what is of real worth, experiments have been 
conducted, designed to answer the following 
questions: "Among the apparently aimless 
and valueless spontaneous activities of the child 
is it possible to discover some which may be 
used as the point of departure for ends of recog- 
nized worth? Are there some of these crude 
expressions which, if properly directed, may 



PLAY 111 

develop into beginnings of the fine and indus- 
trial arts? How far does the preservation of, 
the individuality and freedom of the child de- 
mand self -initiated activities? Is it possible 
for the teacher to set problems or ends suffi- 
ciently childlike to fit in with the mode of 
growth, and to inspire their adoption with the 
same fine enthusiasm which accompanies the 
self -initiated ones?" 

The result showed that the best success came 
when the children's instinctive activities were 
linked up with social interests and experiences. 
The latter center, with young children, in their 
home. Their personal relations are of the 
greatest importance to them. Children's in- 
tense interest in dolls is a sign of the signifi- 
cance attached to human relations. The doll 
thus furnished a convenient starting point. 
"With this as a motive, the children have count- 
less things they wish to do and make. Hand 
and construction work thus acquired a real pur- 
pose, with the added advantage of requiring the 
child to solve a problem. The doll needs 
clothes ; the whole class is eager to make them, 
but the children do not know how to sew or even 
cut cloth. So they start with paper and scis- 
sors, and make patterns, altering and experi- 
menting on the doll for themselves, receiving 



112 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

only suggestions or criticisms from the teacher. 
When they have made successful patterns, they 
choose and cut the cloth, and then learn to sew 
it. If the garments are not wholly successful, 
the class has had a great deal of fun making 
them, and has had the training that comes from 
working towards a definite end, besides acquir- 
ing as much control over scissors, paper, and 
needle, and manual dexterity as would accrue 
from the conventional paper cutting, pricking, 
and sewing exercises. 

The doll needs a house. In a corner of the 
room there is a great chest of big blocks, so 
large that it takes the whole class to build the 
house, and then it is not done in one day. 
There are flat long blocks like boards for the 
walls and roof, and square blocks for the foun- 
dations and window frames. When the house 
is done, it is big enough for two or three chil- 
dren to go into to play with the doll. One 
readily sees that it has taken a great deal of 
hard thinking and experimenting to make a 
house that would really stand up and serve such 
uses. Then the house needs furniture ; the chil- 
dren learn to handle tools in fashioning tables, 
chairs, and beds, from blocks of wood and thin 
boards. Getting the legs on a table is an espe- 
cially interesting problem to the class, and over 



PLAY 113 

and over again they have discovered for them- 
selves how it can be done. Dishes for the doll 
family furnish the motive for clay modeling and 
decoration. Dressing and undressing the dolls 
is an occupation the children never tire of, and 
it furnishes excellent practice in buttoning and 
unbuttoning and tying bows. 

The changing seasons of the year and the pro- 
cession of outdoor games they bring furnish 
other motives for production that meet a real 
need of the children. In the spring-time they 
want marbles and tops, in the fall, kites ; the 
demand for wagons is not limited to any one sea- 
son. Whenever possible the children are allowed 
to solve their own problems. If they want mar- 
bles they experiment until they find a good way 
to make them round, while if they are making 
something more difficult where the whole proc- 
ess is obviously beyond them, they are helped. 
This help, however, never takes the form of dic- 
tation as to how to perform each step in its 
order, for the object of the work is to train the 
child's initiative and self-reliance, to teach him 
to think straight by having him work on his own 
problems. The little carts which the older chil- 
dren make would be beyond them if they had to 
plan and shape the material for themselves ; but 
when they are given the sawed boards and 



114 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

round pieces for wheels, they find out by trying 
how they can be put together, and thus make 
usable little wagons. Making bags for their 
marbles, and aprons to protect their clothes 
while they are painting the dolls' furniture or 
washing the dishes after lunch, offer additional 
opportunities for sewing. 

From the needs of an individual doll the 
child's interest naturally develops to the needs 
of a family and then of a whole community. 
With paper dolls and boxes, the children make 
and furnish dolls' houses for themselves, until 
all together they produce an entire village. On 
their sand table the whole class may make a 
town with houses and streets, fences and rivers, 
trees and animals for the gardens. In fact, the 
play of the children furnishes more opportunity 
for making things than there is time for in the 
school year. This construction work not only 
fills the children with the interest and enthu- 
siasm they always show for any good game, but 
teaches them the use of work. In supplying the 
needs of the dolls and their own games, they are 
supplying in miniature the needs of society, and 
are acquiring control over the tools that society 
actually uses in meeting these wants. Boys and 
girls alike take the same interest in all these 
occupations, whether they are sewing and play- 



PLAY 115 

ing with dolls, or marble making and carpentry. 
The idea that certain games and occupations are 
for boys and others for girls is a purely artificial 
one that has developed as a reflection of the con- 
ditions existing in adult life. It does not occur 
to a boy that dolls are not just as fascinating 
and legitimate a plaything for him as for his 
sister, until some one puts the idea into his head. 

The program of this kindergarten is not de- 
voted exclusively to play construction. It occu- 
pies the place of the paper folding, pricking and 
sewing and the object lesson work of the older 
kindergartens, leaving plenty of time every day 
to try their playthings and to take care of their 
little gardens out of doors, as well as for group 
games, stories and songs. 

An interesting application of the play motive 
is being tried at the Teachers' College play 
ground, by the same teachers who are conduct- 
ing the kindergarten. There is an outdoor 
playground for the use of the younger grades 
after school hours. Instead of spending their 
time doing gymnastic exercises or playing group 
games the children are making a town. They 
use large packing cases for houses and stores, 
two or three children taking care of each one; 
and have worked out quite an elaborate town 
organization, with a telephone, mail and police 



116 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

service, a bank to coin money, and ingenious 
schemes for keeping the cash in circulation. 
Much of the time is spent in carpentry work, 
building and repairing the houses and making 
wagons, furniture for the houses, or stock for 
the two stores. The work affords almost as 
much physical exercise as the ordinary sort of 
playground. It keeps the children busy and 
happy in a much more effective way, for besides 
healthy play in the open air they are learning 
to take a useful and responsible share in a com- 
munity. 

A kindergarten conducted along the same 
lines exists in Pittsburgh as part of the city 
university. It is called ''The School of Child- 
hood," and emphasizes the healthy physical de- 
velopment of the children. The work is cen- 
tered around the natural interests of children; 
and while they apparently do not do as much 
construction work as in the Teachers' College 
kindergarten, there is more individual play. 
The writer has not visited the school, but it 
seems to embrace a number of novel elements 
that ought to be suggestive to any one inter- 
ested in educational experiments. 

The ''Play School" conducted by Miss Pratt 
in New York City organizes all the work around 
the play activities of little children. Quoting 



PLAY 117 

Miss Pratt, her plan is: **To offer an oppor- 
tunity to the child to pick up the thread of life 
in his own community, and to express what he 
gets in an individual way. The experiment con- 
cerns itself with getting subject-matter first 
hand, and it is assumed that the child has much 
information to begin with, that he is adding to 
it day by day, that it is possible to direct his 
attention so that he may get his information in 
a more related way ; and with applying such in- 
formation to individual schemes of play with 
related toys and blocks as well as expressing 
himself through such general means as draw- 
ing, dramatization, and spoken language." 

The children are of kindergarten age and 
come from homes where the opportunities for 
real activity are limited. Each child has floor 
space of his own with a rug, and screens to 
isolate him sufficiently so that his work is really 
individual. There is a small work shop in the 
room where the pupils can make or alter things 
they need in their play. The tools are full size, 
and miscellaneous scraps of wood are used. In 
cupboards and shelves around the room are all 
sorts of material: toys, big and little blocks, 
clay, pieces of cloth, needle and thread, and a 
set of Montessori material. Each child has 
scissors, paper, paints, and pencil of his own, 



118 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

and is free to use all the material as lie chooses. 
He selects either isolated objects he wants to 
make, or lays out some larger construction, such 
as a railroad track and stations, or a doll's 
house, or a small town or farm, and then from 
the material at hand works out his own execu- 
tion of his idea. One piece of work often 
lasts over several days, and involves consider- 
able incidental construction, such as tracks 
and signals, clay dishes, furniture or new 
clothes for the doll. The role of the teacher 
is to teach the pupil processes and control of 
tools, not in a prearranged scale but as they are 
needed in construction. The teacher has every 
opportunity to see the individual's weaknesses 
and abilities and so to check or stimulate at the 
proper time. Besides the motor control which 
the pupils develop through their handling of 
material, they are constantly increasing their 
ingenuity and initiative. 

The elements of number work are taught in 
connection with the construction; and if a 
child shows a desire to make letters or signs 
in connection with his other work, he is helped 
and shown how. The toys used are particu- 
larly good. There are flat wooden dolls about 
half an inch thick, men, women, and chil- 
dren, whose joints bend so that they will stay 





„.^ 



Constructing in miniature the things they see around them. 
(Play School, New York City.) 



PLAY 119 

in any position; all sorts of farm animals 
and two or three kinds of little wagons that 
fit the dolls; quantities of big blocks that 
fasten together with wooden pegs, so that the 
houses and bridges do not fall down. Every- 
thing is strongly made on the simplest plan, 
so that material can be used not only freely 
but also effectively. Each success is a stimulus 
to new and more complicated effort. There is 
no discouragement from slipshod stuff. The 
pupils take care of the toys themselves, getting 
them out and putting them away. They also 
care for the classroom and serve their mid- 
morning luncheon. This work, coupled with 
the fact that the constructions are almost always 
miniature copies of the things that the pupils 
see in their community, saves the work from any 
hint of artificiality. The children's construc- 
tions grow out of the observations already 
spoken of (p. 100), and give a motive for talk- 
ing over what they have seen and making new, 
more extensive and more accurate observations. 
The natural desire of children to play can, 
of course, be made the most of in the lowest 
grades, but there is one element of the play 
instinct which schools are utilizing in the higher 
grades — that is, the instinct for dramatization, 
for make-believe in action. All children love to 



120 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEEOW 

pretend that they are some body or thing other 
than themselves ; they love to make a situation 
real by going through the motions it suggests. 
Abstract ideas are hard to understand ; the child 
is never quite sure whether he really under- 
stands or not. Allow him to act out the idea 
and it becomes real to him, or the lack of under- 
standing is shown in what is done. Action is 
the test of comprehension. This is simply an- 
other way of saying that learning by doing is a 
better way to learn than by listening — the dif- 
ference of dramatization from the work already 
described lies in the things the child is learn- 
ing. He is no longer dealing with material 
where things are needed to carry an act to a 
successful result, but with ideas which need ac- 
tion to make them real. Schools are making 
use of dramatization in all sorts of different 
ways to make teaching more concrete. For 
older children dramatization is used principally 
in the strict sense of the word ; that is, by hav- 
ing pupils act in plays, either as a means of 
making the English or history more real, or 
simply for the emotional and imaginative value 
of the work. With the little children it is used 
as an aid in the teaching of history, English, 
reading, or arithmetic, and is often combined 
with other forms of activity. 



PLAY 121 

Many schools use dramatization as a help in 
teaching the first steps of any subject, especially 
in the lower grades. A first year class, for ex- 
ample, act the subject-matter of their regular 
reading lesson, each child having the part of 
one of the characters of the story, animal or 
person. This insures an idea of the situation as 
a whole, so that reading ceases to be simply an 
attempt to recognize and pronounce isolated 
words and phrases. Moreover, the interest of 
the situation carries children along, and enlists 
attention to difiSculties of phraseology which 
might, if attacked as separate things, be dis- 
couraging. The dramatic factor is a great as- 
sistance in the expressive side of reading. 
Teachers are always having to urge children to 
read ^ ' naturally, " ' ' to read as they talk. ' ' But 
when a child has no motive for communication 
of what he sees in the text, knowing as he does 
that the teacher has the book and can tell it 
better than he can, even the naturalness tends to 
be forced and artificial. Every observer knows 
how often children who depart from humdrum 
droning, learn to exhibit only a superficial breath- 
less sort of liveliness and a make-believe anima- 
tion. Dramatization secures both attention to 
the thought of the text and a spontaneous en- 
deavor, free from pretense and self-conscious- 



122 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

ness, to speak loudly enough to be heard and to 
enunciate distinctly. In the same way, chil- 
dren tell stories much more effectively when 
they are led to visualize for themselves the ac- 
tions going on, than when they are simply re- 
peating something as a part of the school rou- 
tine. "When children are drawing scenes in- 
volving action and posture, it is found that 
prior action is a great assistance. In the case 
of a pose of the body, the child who has done 
the posing is often found to draw better than 
those who have merely looked on. He has 
got the *'feel" of the situation, which readily 
influences his hand and eye in the subsequent 
reproduction. In the early grades when pupils 
fail in a concrete problem in arithmetic, it is 
frequently found that resort to '^ acting out'* 
the situation supplies all the assistance needed. 
The real difficulty was not with the numbers but 
in failure to grasp the meaning of the situation 
in which the numbers were to be used. 

In the upper grades, literature and history, 
as already indicated, are often reenforced by 
dramatic activities. A sixth grade in Indian- 
apolis engaged in dramatizing ''Sleeping 
Beauty," not merely composed the words and 
the stage directions, but also wrote songs and 
the music for them. Such concentration on a 



PLAY 123 

single purpose of studies usually pursued inde- 
pendently stimulates work in each. Literary 
expression is less monotonous, the phrasing of 
an idea more delicate and flexible, than when 
composition is an end in itself; and while of 
course the music is not likely to be remarkable, 
it almost always has a freshness and charm ex- 
ceeding that which could be attained from the 
same pupils if they were merely writing music. 
A shoe store in the second grade furnished the 
basis of the work for several days. The chil- 
dren set up a shop and chose pupils to take the 
part of the shoe clerk, the shoemaker, and the 
family going to buy shoes. Then they acted 
out the story of a mother and children going to 
the store for shoes. Arithmetic and English 
lessons were based on the store, and the class 
wrote stories about it. This same class sang 
and acted out to a simple tune a little verse about 
the combinations that make ten. The same 
pupils were doing problems in mental arithmetic 
that were much beyond the work usually found 
in a second grade, adding almost instantly num- 
bers like 74 and 57. They probably could not 
have gone so rapidly if they had not had so 
much of the dramatization work. It served to 
make their abstract problems seem real. In 
doing problems about Mrs. Baldwin's shoes 



124 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

they had come to think of numbers as having 
some meaning and purpose, so that when a 
problem in pure numbers was given they did 
not approach it with misgivings and uncer- 
tainty. One of the fifth grades had installed a 
parcel post office ; they made money and stamps 
and brought bundles to school, then they played 
post office ; two boys took the part of postmen, 
weighed the packages, looked up the rate of 
postage, and gave change for the customers. 
Tables of weights ceased to be verbal forms to 
be memorized; consultation of the map was a 
necessity; the multiplication table was a neces- 
sity; the system and order required in success- 
ful activity were impressed. 

The Francis Parker School is one of many 
using the dramatic interest of the pupils as an 
aid in teaching history. The fourth grade 
studies Greek history, and the work includes the 
making of a Greek house, and writing poems 
about some Greek myth. The children make 
Greek costumes and wear them every day in the 
classroom. To quote Miss Hall, who teaches 
this grade: ''They play sculptor and make 
clay statuettes of their favorite gods and mould 
figures to illustrate a story. They model 
Mycense in sand-pans, ruin it, cover it, and be- 
come the excavators who bring its treasures to 



PLAY 125 

light again. They write prayers to Dionysius 
and stories such as they think Orpheus might 
have sung. They play Greek games and wear 
Greek costumes, and are continually acting out 
stories or incidents which please them. To-day 
as heroes of Troy, they have a battle at recess 
time with wooden swords and barrel covers. In 
class time, with prayers and dances and extem- 
pore song, they hold a Dionysiac festival. 
Again, half of them are Athenians and half of 
them Spartans in a war of words as to which 
city is more to be desired. Or they are freemen 
of Athens, replying spiritedly to the haughty 
Persian message." Besides these daily drama- 
tizations, they write and act for the whole school 
a little play which illustrates some incident of 
history that has particularly appealed to them. 
History taught in this way to little children ac- 
quires meaning and an emotional content; they 
appreciate the Greek spirit and the things which 
made a great people. The work so becomes a 
part of their lives that it is remembered as any 
personal experience is retained, not as texts are 
committed to memory to be recited upon. 

The Francis Parker School takes advantage 
of the social value of dramatizations in its morn- 
ing exercises. Studying alone out of a book is 
an isolated and unsocial performance ; the pupil 



126 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW ^ 

may be learning the words before him, but he is 
not learning to act with other people, to control 
and arrange his actions and thought so that 
other persons have an equal opportunity to ex- 
press themselves in a shared experience. When 
the classes represent by action what they have 
learned from books, all the members have a 
part, so that they learn to cherish socially, as 
well as to develop, powers of expression and of 
dramatic and emotional imagery. When they 
act in front of the whole school they get the 
value of the work for themselves individually 
and help the growth of a spirit of unity and 
cooperation in the entire school. All the chil- 
dren, big and little, become interested in the sort 
of thing that is going on in the other grades, 
and learn to appreciate effort that is simple and 
sincere, whether it comes from the first grade 
or the seniors in high school. In their efforts 
to interest the whole school the actors learn to 
be simple and direct, and acquire a new respect 
for their work by seeing its value for others. 
Summaries of the work in different subjects are 
given in the morning exercises by any grade 
which thinks it has something to say that would 
interest the other children. The dramatic ele- 
ment is sometimes small, as in the descriptions 
of excursions, of curious processes in arithmetic 



PLAY 127 

or of some topic in geography ; but the children 
always have to think clearly and speak well, or 
their audience will not understand them, and 
maps or diagrams and all sorts of illustrative 
material are introduced as much as possible. 
Other exercises, such as the Greek play written 
by the fourth grade, or a dramatization of one 
of Cicero's orations against Cataline, are purely 
dramatic in their interest. 

The production of plays by graduating classes 
or for some specific purpose is of course a well- 
known method of interesting pupils or adver- 
tising a school. But recently schools have been 
giving plays and festivals for their educational 
value as well as for their interest to children and 
the public. The valuable training which comes 
from speaking to an audience, using the body 
effectively and working with other pupils for a 
common end, is present, whatever the nature 
of the play ; and schools usually try to have their 
productions of some literary value. But until 
recently the resources of the daily work of the 
pupils for dramatic purposes have been over- 
looked. Being for purposes of public entertain- 
ment, plays were added on after school hours. 
But schools are beginning to utilize this natural 
desire of young people to ''act something" for 
amplifying the curriculum. In many schools 



128 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

where dramatization of a rather elaborate char- 
acter is employed for public performances, the 
subject-matter is now taken from English and 
history, while writing the play supplies another 
English lesson. The rehearsals take the place 
of lessons in expression and elocution, and in- 
volve self-control. The stage settings and cos- 
tumes are made in the shop and art periods, the 
planning and management being done by the 
pupils, the teacher helping enough to prevent 
blunders and discouragement. At Riverside 
one of the classes had been reading Tolstoi's 
''Where Love Is There Is God" for their work 
in literature. They rewrote the story as a play 
and rehearsed it in their English lessons, the 
whole class acting as coach and critic. As their 
interest grew they made costumes and arranged 
a stage setting and finally gave the play to an 
audience of the school and its friends. At an- 
other time the English class gave an outdoor 
performance of a sketch which they had written, 
based on the Odyssey. The American history 
class at the Speyer School give a play which 
they write about some incident in pioneer his- 
tory. During the rehearsal nearly all the chil- 
dren try the parts, quite regardless of sex or 
other qualifications, and the whole class chooses 
the final cast. The fifth grade was studying 



PLAY 129 

Irving's ''Sketch Book" in connection with its 
history and literature work, and dramatized the 
story of Rip Van Winkle, doing all its own 
coaching and costuming. 

The Howland School, one of the public schools 
of Chicago situated in a foreign district, gave 
a large festival play during the past year. The 
principal wrote and arranged a pageant illus- 
trating the story of Columbus, and the whole 
school took part in the acting. The story gave 
a simple outline of the life of Columbus. A few 
tableaux were added about some of the most 
striking events in pioneer history, arranged to 
bring out the fact that this country is a democ- 
racy. The children made their own costumes 
for the most part, and all the dances they had 
learned during the year in gymnasium were in- 
troduced. Thus the whole exhibition presented 
a very good picture of the outline of our history 
and the spirit of the country, and at the same 
time offered an interesting summary of the 
year's work. Its value as a unifying influence 
in a foreign community was considerable, for 
besides teaching the children something of the 
history of their new country, it gave the parents, 
who made up the audience, an opportunity to 
see what the school could do for their children 
and the neighborhood. The patriotic value of 



130 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

such exercises is greater than the daily flag 
salute or patriotic poem, for the children under- 
stand what they are supposed to be enthusiastic 
about, as they see before them the things which 
naturally arouse patriotic emotions. 

Exercises to commemorate holidays or sea- 
sons are more interesting and valuable than 
the old-fashioned entertainment where indi- 
vidual pupils recited poems, and adults made 
speeches, for they concentrate in a social ex- 
pression the work of the school. The com- 
munity is more interested because parents know 
that their own children have had their share in 
the making of the production, and the children 
are more interested because they are working 
in groups on something which appeals to them 
and for which they are responsible. The 
graduating exercises at many schools are now 
of a kind to present in a dramatic review the 
regular work of the year. Each grade may take 
part, presenting a play which they have written 
for work in English, dancing some of the folk 
or fancy dances they have learned in gymna- 
sium, etc. Many schools have a Thanksgiving 
exercise in which different grades give scenes 
from the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, or 
present dramatic pictures of the harvest festivals 
of different nations. In similar fashion Christ- 



PLAY 131 

mas entertainments are often made up of songs, 
poems and readings by children from different 
grades, or by the whole grade, which have been 
arranged in the English and music classes. 
The possibilities for plays, festivals, and 
pageants arranged on this plan are endless ; for 
it is always possible to find subject-matter which 
will give the children just as much training in 
reading, spelling, history, literature, or even 
some phases of geography, as would dry Grad- 
grind facts of a routine text-book type. 



CHAPTER VI 

FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 

The reader has undoubtedly been struck by 
the fact that in all of the work described, pupils 
must have been allowed a greater amount of 
freedom than is usually thought compatible with 
the necessary discipline of a schoolroom. To 
the great majority of teachers and parents the 
very word school is synonymous with *^ disci- 
pline/' with quiet, with rows of children sitting 
still at desks and listening to the teacher, speak- 
ing only when they are spoken to. Therefore 
a school where these fundamental character- 
istics are lacking must of necessity be a poor 
school ; one where pupils do not learn anything, 
where they do just as they please, quite regard- 
less of what they please, even though it be harm- 
ful to the child himself or disagreeable to his 
classmates and the teacher. 

There is a certain accumulation of facts that 
every child must acquire or else grow up to 
be illiterate. These facts relate principally to 
adult life ; therefore it is not surprising that the 

133 



FEEEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 133 

pupil is not interested in thenr, while it is the 
duty of the school to see that he knows them 
nevertheless. How is this to be done^ Obvi- 
ously by seating the children in rows, far enough 
apart so that they cannot easily talk to each 
other, and hiring the most efficient person avail- 
able to teach the facts ; to tell them to the child, 
and have him repeat them often enough so that 
he can reasonably be expected to remember 
them, at least until after he is ''promoted." 

Again, children should be taught to obey; 
efficiency in doing as one is told is a useful ac- 
complishment, just as the doing of distasteful 
and uninteresting tasks is a character builder. 
The pupil should be taught to ''respect" his 
teacher and learning in general ; and how can he 
be taught this lesson if he does not sit quietly 
and receptively in the face of both? But if he 
will not be receptive, he must at least be quiet, 
so that the teacher can teach him anyway. The 
very fact that the pupil so often is lawless, de- 
structive, rude and noisy as soon as restraint 
is removed proves, according to the advocates 
of "discipline" by authority, that this is the 
only way of dealing with the child, since with- 
out such restraint the child would behave all 
day long as he does when it is removed for a 
few uncertain minutes. 



134 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

If this statement of the disciplinarian's case 
sounds harsh and unadorned, think for a mo- 
ment of the things that visitors to "queer 
schools" say after the visit is over; and con- 
sider whether they do not force the unprejudiced 
observer to the conclusion that their idea of 
schools and schooling is just such a harsh and 
unadorned affair. The discussion of freedom 
versus authoritative discipline in schools re- 
solves itself after all into a question of the con- 
ception of education which is entertained. Are 
we to believe, with the strict disciplinarian, that 
education is the process of making a little sav- 
age into a little man, that there are many vir- 
tues as well as facts that have to be taught to 
all children so that they may as nearly as pos- 
sible approach the adult standard? Or are we 
to believe, with Rousseau, that education is the 
process of making up the discrepancy between 
the child at his birth and the man as he will 
need to be, ''that childhood has its own ways of 
seeing, thinking, and feeling," and that the 
method of training these ways to what a man 
will need is to let the child test them upon the 
world about him? 

The phrase, ''authoritative discipline," is 
used purposely, for discipline and freedom are 
not contradictory ideas. The following quota- 



FEEEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 135 

tion from Rousseau shows very plainly what a 
heavy taskmaster even his freedom was, a free- 
dom so often taken to mean mere lawlessness 
and license. ''Give him [the pupil] no orders 
at all, absolutely none. Do not even let him 
think that you claim any authority over him. 
Let him know only that he is weak and you are 
strong, that his condition and yours puts him 
at your mercy ; let this be perceived, learned and 
felt. Let him early find upon his proud neck 
the heavy yoke which nature has imposed upon 
us, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which 
every finite being must bow. Let him find the 
necessity in things, not in the caprices of man; 
let the curb be the force of conditions, not au- 
thority. ' ' 

Surely no discipline could be more severe, 
more apt to develop character and reasonable- 
ness, nor less apt to develop disorder and lazi- 
ness. In fact the real reason for the feeling 
against freedom in schools seems to come from 
a misunderstanding. The critic confuses phys- 
ical liberty with moral and intellectual liberty. 
Because the pupils are moving about, or sitting 
on the floor, or have their chairs scattered about 
instead of in a straight line, because they are 
using their hands and tongues, the visitor thinks 
that their minds must be relaxed as well; that 



136 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

they must be simply fooling, with no more re- 
straint for their minds and morals than appears 
for their bodies. Learning in school has been so 
long associated with a docile or passive mind 
that because that useful organ does not squirm 
or talk in its operations, observers have come to 
think that none of the child should do so, or 
it will interfere with learning. 

Assuming that educational reformers are 
right in supposing that the function of educa- 
tion is to help the growing of a helpless young 
animal into a happy, moral, and efficient human 
being, a consistent plan of education must allow 
enough liberty to promote that growth. The 
child's body must have room to move and stretch 
itself, to exercise the muscles and to rest when 
tired. Every one agrees that swaddling clothes 
are a bad thing for the baby, cramping and in- 
terfering with bodily functions. The swaddling 
clothes of the straight-backed desk, head to the 
front and hands folded, are just as cramping 
and even more nerve racking to the school child. 
It is no wonder that pupils who have to sit in 
this way for several hours a day break out in 
bursts of immoderate noise and fooling as soon 
as restraining influences are removed. Since 
they do not have a normal outlet for their phys- 
ical energy to spend itself, it is stored up, and 



FEEEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 137 

when opportunity offers it breaks forth all the 
more impetuously because of the nervous irrita- 
tion previously suffered in repressing the action 
of an imperfectly trained body. Give a child 
liberty to move and stretch when he needs it, 
with opportunities for real exercise all through 
the day and he will not become so nervously 
overwrought that he is irritable or aimlessly 
boisterous when left to himself. Trained in 
doing things, he will be able to keep at work and 
to think of other people when he is not under 
restraining supervision. 

A truly scientific education can never develop 
so long as children are treated in the lump, 
merely as a class. Each child has a strong in- 
dividuality, and any science must take stock of 
all the facts in its material. Every pupil must 
have a chance to show what he truly is, so that 
the teacher can find out what he needs to make 
him a complete human being. Only as a teacher 
becomes acquainted with each one of her pupils 
can she hope to understand childhood, and it is 
only as she understands it that she can hope 
to evolve any scheme of education which shall 
approach either the scientific or the artistic 
standard. As long as educators do not know 
their individual facts they can never know 
whether their hypotheses are of value. But how 



138 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

are they to know their material if they impose 
themselves upon it to such an extent that each 
portion is made to act just like every other por- 
tion? If the pupils are marched into line, in- 
formation presented to them which they are 
then expected to give back in uniform fashion, 
nothing will ever be found out about any of 
them. But if every pupil has an opportunity 
to express himself, to show what are his par- 
ticular qualities, the teacher will have material 
on which to base her plans of instruction. 

Since a child lives in a social world, where 
even the simplest act or word is bound up with 
the words and acts of his neighbors, there is no 
danger that this liberty will sacrifice the inter- 
ests of others to caprice. Liberty does not 
mean the removal of the checks which nature 
and man impose on the life of every individual 
in the community, so that one individual may 
indulge impulses which go against his own wel- 
fare as a member of society. But liberty for 
the child is the chance to test all impulses and 
tendencies on the world of things and people in 
which he finds himself, sufficiently to discover 
their character so that he may get rid of those 
which are harmful, and develop those which are 
useful to himself and others. Education which 
treats all children as if their impulses were 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 139 

those of tlie average of an adult society (whose 
weaknesses and failures are moreover con- 
stantly deplored) is sure to go on reproducing 
that same average society without even finding 
out whether and how it might be better. Edu- 
cation which finds out what children really are 
may be able to shape itself by this knowledge so 
that the best can be kept and the bad eliminated. 
Meantime much is lost by a mere external sup- 
pression of the bad which equally prevents the 
expression of the better. 

If education demands liberty before it can 
shape itself according to facts, how is it to use 
this liberty for the benefit of the child? Give 
a child freedom to find out what he can and can 
not do, both in the way of what is physically 
possible and what his neighbors will stand for, 
and he will not waste much time on impossibili- 
ties but will bend his energies to the possibilities. 
The physical energy and mental inquisitiveness 
of children can be turned into positive channels. 
The teacher will find the spontaneity, the liveli- 
ness, and initiative of the pupil aids in teaching, 
instead of being, as under the coercive system, 
nuisances to be repressed. The very things 
which are now interferences will become posi- 
tive qualities that the teacher is cultivating. 
Besides preserving qualities which will be of 



140 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

use to the man and developing habits of inde- 
pendence and industry, allowing the child this 
freedom is necessary if pupils are really to 
learn by doing. Most doing will lead only to 
superficial muscle training if it is dictated to 
the child and prescribed for him step by step. 
But when the child's natural curiosity and love 
of action are put to work on useful problems, on 
finding out for himself how to adjust his en- 
vironment to his needs, the teacher finds that 
the pupils are not only doing their lessons as 
well as ever, but are also learning how to con- 
trol and put to productive use those energies 
which are simply disturbing in the average 
classroom. 'Unless the pupil has some real 
work on which to exercise his mind by means of 
his senses and muscles, the teacher will not be 
able to do away with the ordinary disciplinary 
methods. For in a classroom where the teacher 
is doing all the work and the children are listen- 
ing and answering questions, it would be absurd 
to allow the children to place themselves where 
they please, to move about, or to talk. Where 
the teacher's role has changed to that of helper 
and observer, where the development of every 
child is the goal, such freedom becomes as much 
a necessity of the work as is quiet where the chil- 
dren are simply reciting. 





Learning to live through situations that are typical of social 
life. (Teachers Pollege, N. Y. City.) 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 141 

At present, the most talked of schools in which 
freedom and liberty are necessary for the chil- 
dren's work are the schools of Madame Maria 
Montessori in Italy and those of her pupils in 
this country. Madame Montessori believes, 
with many educators in this country, that liberty 
is necessary in the classroom if the teacher is 
to know the needs and capabilities of each pupil, 
if the child is to receive in school a well-rounded 
training making for the best development of his 
mind, character, and physique. In general, her 
reasons for insisting upon this liberty, which is 
the basis of her method, correspond with those 
outlined above, with one exception. She holds 
that liberty is necessary for the child if a scien- 
tific education is to be created, because without 
it data on which to base principles can not be 
collected ; also that it is necessary for the phys- 
ical welfare of the pupils and for the best de- 
velopment of their characters in training them 
to be independent. The point of difference be- 
tween the Italian educator and most reformers 
in this country lies in their respective views of 
the value of liberty in the use of material, and 
this point will be taken up later. 

Madame Montessori believes that repressing 
children physically while they are in school and 
teaching them habits of mental passivity and 



142 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

docility is mistaking the function of the school 
and doing the children real harm. Scientific 
education not only needs freedom for the child 
in order to collect data, but liberty is its very 
basis; 'liberty is activity," says Madame 
Montessori in her book called ''The Montessori 
Method." Activity is the basis ©f life, con- 
sequently training children to move and act is 
training them for life, which is the proper office 
of the schoolroom. The object of liberty is the 
best interests of the whole group ; this becomes 
the end of the liberty allowed the children. 
Everything which does not contribute to it must 
be suppressed, while the greatest care is taken 
to foster every action with a useful scope. In 
order to give the pupils the largest possible 
scope for such useful activity, they are allowed 
a very large amount of freedom in the class- 
room. They may move about, talk to each 
other, place their tables and chairs where they 
please, and, what is of more significance, each 
pupil may choose what work he will do, and 
may work at one thing as long or as short a 
time as he wishes. She says, ''A room in which 
all the children move about usefully, intelli- 
gently, and voluntarily, without committing any 
rough or rude act, would seem to me a class- 
room very well disciplined indeed." Disci- 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 143 

pline, in short, is ability to do things indepen- 
dently, not submission under restraint. 

In order to bring about this active discipline, 
which allows free scope for any useful work, 
and at the same time does not stifle the spon- 
taneous impulses of the child, the ordinary 
methods of discipline are done away with, and 
a technique is developed to emphasize the posi- 
tive, not the negative, side of discipline. 
Montessori has described it in this way: "As 
to punishments, we have many times come in 
contact with children who disturbed the others, 
without paying any attention to our corrections. 
Such children were at once examined by the 
physician. When the case proved to be that of 
a normal child, we placed one of the little tables 
in a corner of the room, and in this way isolated 
the child, having him sit in a comfortable little 
armchair, so placed that he might see his com- 
panions at work, and giving him those games 
and toys to which he was most attracted. This 
isolation almost always succeeded in calming 
the child ; from his position he could see the en- 
tire assembly of his companions, and the way 
in which they carried on their work was an 
object-lesson much more efficacious than any 
words of the teacher could possibly have been. 
Little by little he would come to see the advan- 



144 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

tages of being one of the company working so 
busily before bis eyes, and he would really wish 
to go back and do as the others did." The cor- 
rections which the teachers first offer never take 
the form of scoldings ; the child is quietly told 
that what he is doing is not polite or disturbs 
the other children. Then he is told how he 
ought to behave to be a pleasant companion, or 
his attention is diverted to a piece of work. Be- 
cause children are working on something of their 
own choice, and when they want to, and because 
they may move and talk enough so that they do 
not get nervously tired, there is very little need 
for any * * punishment. ' ' Except for an isolated 
case of real lawlessness, such as Montessori re- 
fers to in the quotation just cited, the visitor to 
one of her schools sees very little need of nega- 
tive discipline. The teachers' corrections are 
practically all for small breaches of manners or 
for carelessness. 

Activity founded on liberty being the guiding 
principle of the Montessori schools, activity is 
expended by the child on two sorts of material. 
Montessori believes that the child needs prac- 
tice in the actions of daily life; that, for ex- 
ample, he should be taught how to take care of 
and wait on himself. Part of the work is ac- 
cordingly directed to this end. She also be- 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 145 

lieves that the child possesses innate faculties 
which should be allowed to develop to their full- 
est; consequently part of the work is designed 
to give adequate expression to these faculties. 
These exercises for the culture of the inner po- 
tentialities of the child she considers the more 
important of the two. The child needs to know 
how to adjust himself to his environment in 
order to be independent and happy ; but an im- 
perfect development of the child's faculties is 
an imperfect development of life itself; so the 
real object of education consists in furnishing 
active help to the normal expansion of the life 
of the child. These two lines of development 
Madame Montessori considers to be so distinct 
one from the other that the exercises of prac- 
tical life cannot perform the function of the 
exercises arranged to train the faculties and 
senses of the child. 

The exercises of practical life are designed to 
teach the child to be independent, to supply his 
own wants, and to perform the actions of daily 
life with skill and grace. The pupils keep the 
schoolroom in order, dusting and arranging the 
furniture, and putting away each piece of ma- 
terial as soon as they are through with it. They 
wait on themselves while they are working, get- 
ting out the things they want, finding a con- 



146 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

venient place to work, and then taking care of 
the apparatus when they have worked with it as 
long as they like. In schools where the chil- 
dren do not live in the building, a midday lunch 
is served for the pupils; and, except for the 
cooking, the children do all the work connected 
with the meal, setting tables, serving food, and 
then clearing away and washing the dishes. All 
the pupils share alike in this work, regardless 
of their age; children of three and four soon 
learn to handle the plates and glasses, and to 
pass the food. Wherever possible the schools 
have gardens, which the children care for, and 
animal pets of a useful sort — hens and chickens 
or pigeons. Even the youngest children put on 
their own wraps, button and unbutton their 
aprons and slippers, and when they can not do 
it for themselves, they help each other. The 
necessity of the pupils' learning to take care of 
themselves as early as possible is so much in- 
sisted upon that in order to help the youngest 
in learning this lesson, Montessori has designed 
several appliances to give them practice before 
they begin to wait upon themselves. These are 
wooden frames, fitted with cloth which is opened 
down the center. Then the edges are joined 
either with buttons, hooks and eyes, or ribbons, 
and practice consists in opening and closing 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 147 

these edges by buttoning, hooking, or tying as 
the case may be. 

These appliances may be taken as a bridge 
between the two sorts of exercises in use in the 
Montessori schools. They mark a transition 
from the principles which are common to most 
educational reformers to those associated par- 
ticularly with the method worked out by 
Madame Montessori. Another quotation from 
her first book gives the clew to an understand- 
ing of this method : ' ' In a pedagogical method 
which is experimental the education of the 
senses must undoubtedly assume the greatest 
importance. . . . The method used by me is that 
of making a pedagogical experiment with a 
didactic object and awaiting the spontaneous 
reaction of the child. . . . With little children, 
we must proceed to the making of trials, and 
must select the didactic materials in which they 
show themselves to be interested. ... I believe, 
however, that I have arrived at a selection of 
objects representing the minimum necessary to 
a practical sense education." 

Madame Montessori started her career as a 
teacher among deficient children in the hospitals 
where Seguin had worked. Naturally she ex- 
perimented with the material used with her sub- 
normal pupils when she began working with 



148 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

normal children. It is equally natural that 
many of the objects which had proved useful 
with the former were also usable with the aver- 
age school child. Ordinary school methods suc- 
ceed with deficient children when used more 
slowly and with more patience ; and in the same 
way Madame Montessori found that many of 
the appliances which had before been used only 
for deficients produced remarkably successful 
results with ordinary children, when used with 
more rapidity and liberty. Therefore her 
'^ didactic material" includes many things that 
are used generally to develop sensory conscious- 
ness among deficients. But instead of using the 
material in a fixed order and under the guid- 
ance of a teacher, the normal child is allowed 
complete liberty in its use; for the object is no 
longer to awaken powers that are nearly lack- 
ing, but to exercise powers that the child is 
using constantly in all his daily actions, so that 
he may have a more and more accurate and 
skillful control over them. 

The exercises to develop the faculties of the 
child are especially so arranged as to train the 
power to discriminate and to compare. His 
sensory organs are nearly all exercised with 
apparatus designed, like the button frames, to 
allow the child to do one thing for one purpose. 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 149 

The pupil does not have to use these objects in 
any fixed order or work for any length of time 
on one thing. Except for the very youngest 
children, who do only the very simplest exer- 
cises, pupils are at liberty to work at any one 
they wish and for as long as they wish. Montes- 
sori believes that the child will turn naturally 
to the exercise he is ready for. The materials 
to develop the sense of touch are among the 
simplest. There are small boards with strips 
of sandpaper running from the roughest to the 
smoothest, and pieces of different kinds of cloth ; 
these the child rubs his hands over while his eyes 
are blindfolded, distinguishing the differences. 
The appliances designed to teach the child to 
distinguish differences of form and size use the 
sense of touch as a strong aid to sight. There 
are blocks of wood with holes of different diam- 
eters and depths, and cylinders to fit each hole. 
The child takes all the cylinders out, rubs his 
fingers around their edge and then around the 
rim of the holes and puts them back in the 
proper hole. The ability to judge of size is also 
exercised by giving the child a set of graduated 
wooden blocks with which he builds a tower, and 
another set which he may use to make a stair. 
The power to distinguish form is developed by 
wooden insets of all shapes which fit into holes 



150 . SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

in a thin board. The child takes out the insets, 
feels of them and then replaces them. Later the 
teacher tells him the geometrical name of each 
form while he is touching it, and then has him 
distinguish them by name. 

There are sets of cardboard forms to cor- 
respond to the wooden ones, and metal plaques 
where the form appears as a hole in the center 
of the plaque. These are used in games which 
consist in matching the same form in the dif- 
ferent materials, and for drawing the form in 
outline on paper to be filled in with colored 
pencils. 

The method of teaching reading and writing 
uses the sense of touch to reenforce the lesson 
the pupil gets through the eye and ear. Sand- 
paper alphabets with each letter pasted on a 
square of cardboard are given a child. He 
rubs his finger over these as if he were writing 
and makes the sound of the letter as he rubs. 
Movable letters are used only after the child 
is familiar with the letters by touch, and with 
them he makes words. Writing usually pre- 
cedes reading when children learn in this way; 
when they take pencil or chalk, they are able to 
trace the letters with very little difficulty be- 
cause the muscles as well as the eye are familiar 
with the forms. ^ 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 151 

The sense of hearing is exercised by means of 
two sets of bells, one fixed to give the scale, the 
other movable, so that the child can make his 
own scale by comparing with the fixed scale. 
The children play a number of games where 
they are as quiet as possible, acting out simple, 
whispered directions from the teacher. There 
is as well a series of rattles filled with sand, 
gravel, and grains, and the game is to guess 
which rattle is being shaken. The sense of 
color is developed in the same way by means of 
specially arranged apparatus. This consists of 
small tablets wound with colored silks in all 
colors and shades, which are used in many dif- 
ferent ways, according to the age and skill of 
the pupil. The youngest learn to distinguish 
two or three colors and to tell dark from light 
shades. The older pupils who are familiar with 
the colors acquire enough skill in their manipu- 
lation to be able to glance at one tablet and then 
go to the other side of the room and bring either 
an exact match or the next shade lighter or 
darker, according to what the teacher has asked 
for. 

Muscular development is provided for by 
giving the children plenty of time during the 
school day to run and play, and by means of ap- 
paratus for free gymnastics, while the finer 



152 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

coordinating muscles are being constantly exer- 
cised while the child is manipulating the appli- 
ances for sense training. The faculty of speech 
is trained by having the children practice the 
pronunciation of words and syllables. The 
fundamental conceptions of number are taught 
much as are reading and writing. Besides the 
sandpaper numbers and the plain cardboard 
ones, there is a series of wooden bars varying in 
length from one to ten meters, which the chil- 
dren use in connection with numbers in learning 
the combinations up to ten. 

The foregoing description of the didactic ma- 
terial is very brief and general and omits many 
of the uses of the appliances as well as reference 
to some of the less used material, but it serves 
to illustrate the nature and purpose of the work 
done by the children. Pupils acquire a marked 
skill in the handling of the material which ap- 
peals especially to them, and children of four 
and five learn to write with very little effort, 
In fact, Madame Montessori believes that the 
average child is ready for many of the ideas 
which he usually does not get until his sixth year 
at an earlier age, when they can be acquired 
more easily; and that a system such as hers 
which allows the child to perform one set of acts 
at the time when he is ready for it saves him 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 153 

a great deal of time later on, besides giving a 
more perfect result than could then be achieved. 
Each piece of material is designed to train 
singly one specific sense through the perform- 
ance of one set of fixed acts. Consequently if 
liberty is confounded with doing as one pleases, 
this method must appear very strict. Liberty 
is found in the use the children make of the 
material. The amount of freedom the pupils 
are allowed in the classroom has already been 
described, and the role of the teacher is made to 
correspond with this liberty. She is trained 
not to interfere with any spontaneous activity 
of the child and never to force his attention 
where it is not given naturally. When a child 
has turned of his own accord to a certain appa- 
ratus the teacher may show him the proper use 
of it ; or in rare cases she may try to direct the 
child's attention to a different type of work if 
he seems inclined to concentrate to excess on 
one thing, but if she fails she never insists. In 
fact nothing is done by the teacher to call the 
child's attention to his weaknesses and failures, 
or to arouse any negative associations in his 
mind. Madame Montessori says, *'If he [the 
child] makes a mistake, the teacher must not 
correct him, but must suspend her lesson to 
take it up again another day. Indeed, why cor- 



154 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

rect him? If the child has not succeeded in as- 
sociating the name with the object, the only way 
in which to succeed would be to repeat both the 
action of the sense stimuli and the name; in 
others words, to repeat the lesson. But when 
the child has failed, we should know that he 
was not at that instant ready for the physic as- 
sociations which we wished to provoke in him, 
and we must therefore choose another moment. 
If we should say, in correcting the child, ^No, 
you have made a mistake,' all these words, 
which, being in the form of a reproof, would 
strike him more forcibly than others, would re- 
main in the mind of the child, retarding the 
learning of the names. On the contrary, the 
silence which follows the error leaves the field 
of consciousness clear, and the next lesson may 
successfully follow the first." 

The simplicity and passivity of the teachers' 
role are increased by the nature of the didactic 
material. Once the child has been taught the 
nomenclature connected with the apparatus, the 
teacher ceases to teach. She becomes merely an 
observer as far as that pupil is concerned until 
he is ready to move on to another appliance. 
This is possible because of what Montessori 
calls the ''self -corrective" nature of her ma- 
terial. That is, each thing is arranged so that 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 155 

the child can do but one complete thing with 
it, so that if he makes a mistake the apparatus 
does not work. Thus a child working with any- 
one thing does not have to be told when he 
makes a mistake how to correct it. He is con- 
fronted with an obvious problem, which is 
solved by his own handling of the material. 
The child is educating himself in that he sees 
his own mistakes and corrects them, and the 
finished result is perfect; partial success or 
failure is not possible. 

Take the simplest piece of material, the block 
of wood in which solid cylinders are set. There 
are ten of these cylinders, each varying, say, 
in length about a quarter of an inch from the 
one next it. The child takes all these cylin- 
ders from their proper holes and mixes them 
up ; then he puts them back in their right places 
again. If he puts a cylinder in a hole too deep 
for it, it disappears ; if the hole is too shallow 
it sticks up too far, while if every cylinder 
is put in its proper hole, the child has a solid 
block of wood again. All the geometrical in- 
sets are self-corrective in exactly the same way. 
Even the youngest child would know whether 
he had succeeded with the button and lacing 
frames. The tower blocks will not pile up into 
a tower unless the child piles them one on top 



156 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

of the otlier in decreasing sizes, nor will the 
stair blocks make a stair unless they are laid 
side by side according to the same principle. 
In using the color tablets the child needs rather 
more preparation; but when he has learned to 
distinguish the eight different shades of one of 
the eight colors, he is ready to arrange them so 
that they blend from dark to light, and if he 
makes a mistake the tablet placed in wrong se- 
quence will appear to him as an inharmonious 
blot. Once the pupil gets the idea with one 
color he is able to work it out for himself for 
the other seven. Since the pupils are never 
allowed merely to play with an apparatus, it 
becomes associated in his mind with performing 
the right set of actions, so a misstep appears to 
him as something to be undone, something call- 
ing for another trial. The educational purpose 
Montessori aims to serve in making her material 
self-corrective, is that of leading the child to 
concentrate upon the differences in the parts of 
the appliances he is working with ; that is, in try- 
ing for the fixed end he has to compare and dis- 
criminate between two colors, two sounds, two 
dimensions, etc. It is in making these com- 
parisons that the intellectual value of training 
the senses lies. The particular faculty or 
sense that the child is exercising in using any 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 157 

one apparatus is sharpened by concentration 
upon the relations between the things. Sense- 
development of an intellectual character comes 
from the growth of this power of the sense organ 
to compare and discriminate, not from teaching 
the child to recognize dimensions, sounds, 
colors, etc., nor yet from simply going through 
certain motions without making a mistake. 
Montessori claims that intellectual result dif- 
ferentiates her work from the appliances of the 
kindergarten. 

As we said above, the difference between the 
Montessori method and the views of American 
reformers lies not in a difference of opinion as 
to the value of liberty, but rather in a different 
conception of the best use to be made of it. 
Physically the pupils of a Montessori class are 
freer than they are in the classes of most Ameri- 
can educators with whose views this book has 
been dealing ; intellectually they are not so free. 
They can come and go, work and be idle, talk 
and move about quite voluntarily; getting in- 
formation about things and acquiring skill in 
movement are the ends secured. Each pupil 
works independently on material that is self- 
corrective. But there is no freedom allowed 
the child to create. He is free to choose which 
apparatus he will use, but never to choose his 



158 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

own ends, never to bend a material to his own 
plans. For the matjerial is limited to a fixed 
number of things which must be handled in a 
certain way. Most American educators think 
that the training of the pupil to habits of right 
thinking and judgment is best accomplished by 
means of material which presents to him real 
problems, and they think that the measure of 
reality is found in connection with the experi- 
ences of life out of school. The big thing that 
children have to learn is twofold ; for their ad- 
justment to the world in which they find them- 
selves involves relations to people and to things. 
Adjustment means not simply the ability to con- 
ti'ol their bodies, but an intellectual adjustment 
as well, an ability to see the relations between 
things, to look behind their surface and perceive 
their meaning not alone to the individual, but 
to the community as well. *'The best way of 
making sure that children learn this double ad- 
justment is," says the American school-teacher, 
'*to give them work which represents truly the 
conditions they have to deal with out of school." 
Outside the classroom the child is constantly 
having to bend material things to his own needs, 
and to satisfy the demands that are made upon 
him because he lives with other people. If he 
is to accomplish this successfully for himself 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 159 

and otliers it is important that lie learn to see 
things as they are; that he be able to use his 
senses accurately to understand the meaning 
that things and people have to and for him as 
a member of society. Hence the need of free- 
dom to meet and solve these problems in school, 
much as one has to do out of school. Madame 
Montessori, on the other hand, believes that the 
technique of living can best be learned by the 
child through situations that are not typical 
of social life, but which have been arranged 
in order to exercise some special sense so 
as to develop the faculties of discrimination 
and comparison. 

The difference of opinion resolves itself into 
the acceptance of different views of the nature 
of the human intelligence. Montessori, in com- 
mon with the older psychologists, believes that 
pjeople have ready-made faculties which can be 
trained and developed for general purposes, re- 
gardless of whether the acts by which they are 
exercised have any meaning other than the 
training they afford. The child is bom with un- 
developed faculties which can be made to blos- 
som by suitable appliances, and then devoted at 
will to other uses. Most educators in this coun- 
try agree with the newer psychological theories 
that skill can not be achieved independently of 



160 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the tools used and the object fashioned in the 
accomplishment of a special end. Exercises 
which distinguish for the child the abstract qual- 
ities like length and color, regardless of the 
things of which they are qualities, may give the 
child great skill in performing the special ex- 
ercise, but will not necessarily result in making 
him more successful in dealing with these quali- 
ties as they appear as factors in the situations 
of life. Much less will they train powers of 
comparing and discriminating at large so that 
they may be transferred to any use. A child is 
not born with faculties to be unfolded, but with 
special impulses of action to be developed 
through their use in preserving and perfecting 
life in the social and physical conditions under 
which it goes on. 

If, accordingly, the child in an American pro- 
gressive school does not usually have as much 
freedom of moving about and of choice of his 
time for doing work, the explanation does not 
consist in a less degree of belief in the value 
of liberty. The emphasis falls on the larger 
freedom of using and testing senses and judg- 
ment in situations typical of life. Because these 
situations are social, they require that chil- 
dren work more together in common pursuits; 
because they are social they permit and often 



FBEEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 161 

require the teacher's aid, just as one gains as- 
sistance from others in the ordinary affairs of 
life. Help from others is not to be feared as an 
encroachment upon liberty, but that kind of help 
which restricts the use of the children's own in- 
telligence in forming ends and using ingenuity, 
initiative and inventiveness in the selection and 
adaption of materials. The limitation of mate- 
rial to performing exercises calculated to train 
an isolated sense — a situation that never presents 
itself in life — seems to the American teacher a 
greater limitation of freedom than that which 
arises from the need of cooperation with others 
in the performance of common activities. It is 
desirable not merely that the child should learn 
not to interfere with others as they execute their 
own ends, but also that he should learn to work 
with them in an intelligent way. Hence the 
scope of the material should not be limited to 
training the discriminations and comparisons of 
a single sense (however valuable this may be 
with very young children who are incapable of 
cooperative activity and whose main business is 
to master the use of their organs),* but should 
be varied enough to offer typical problems call- 

* It 13 significant that many who have experimented with 
the apparatus hold that its value is greatest with quite young 
children — three and four years old. 



162 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEEOW 

ing for the kind of comparison and discrimina- 
tion used in ordinary life-situations. And when 
pupils are making real things for real uses, or 
finding out about the activities and materials of 
out-of-school life, several children need to work 
at the same thing and keep at one thing with 
some consecutiveness. 

But if the educators of this country differ 
with Montessori as to the existence of innate 
faculties which can be trained for general ap- 
plication by special exercises designed only for 
training and not for the accomplishment of re- 
sults in which training is incidental, they wel- 
come her efforts to secure that degree of free- 
dom in the schoolroom which will enable 
teachers to become acquainted with the real 
powers and interests of the child and thus se- 
cure the data for a scientific method in educa- 
tion. They appreciate the force of her point 
that artificial conditions of restraint prevent 
teachers from getting true knowledge of the 
material with which they are dealing, so that 
instruction is limited to repetition of traditional 
processes. They perceive that her insistence 
upon touch associated with muscular movement 
as a factor in learning to v/rite and read, is a 
real contribution to the technique of elementary 
instruction. She has become a most important 



FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY 163 

factor in the popularizing of the gospel of lib- 
erty as indispensable to any true education. 

With a wider understanding of the meaning of 
intellectual and moral freedom, and the accom- 
panying breakdown of the negative and coercive 
ideas of discipline, the chief obstacle to the use 
of the teacher's own powers of observation and 
experimentation will disappear. The scientific 
interest which requires personal observation, re- 
flection, and experimental activity, will be added 
to the teacher's sympathetic interest in the wel- 
fare of children. Education that associates 
learning with doing will replace the passive edu- 
cation of imparting the learning of others. 
However well the latter is adapted to feudal 
societies, in which most individuals are expected 
to submit constantly and docilely to the au- 
thority of superiors, an education which pro- 
ceeds on this basis is inconsistent with a demo- 
cratic society where initiative and independence 
are the rule and where every citizen is sup- 
posed to take part in the conduct of affairs of 
common interest. It is significant of the wide- 
reaching development of the democratic spirit 
that the voice most influentially identified at 
the present time with the ideal of liberty in 
education should sound forth from Italy. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE RELATION OF THE SCHOOL TO THE 
COMMUNITY 

Work is essentially social in its character, for 
the occupations which people carry on are for 
human needs and ends. They are concerned 
with maintaining the relations with things and 
with others which make up the world we live 
in. Even the acts that are concerned with 
keeping alive are arranged to fit into a social 
scheme which has modified all man's instinc- 
tive acts and thoughts. Everything about this 
scheme is dependent upon the ability of people 
to work together successfully. If they can do 
this a well-balanced, happy and prosperous so- 
ciety results. Without these occupations, which 
are essentially social life — that is human life — 
civilization can not go on. The result is a sort 
of social education by necessity, since every one 
must learn to adapt himself to other individuals 
and to whole communities. When it is left to 
circumstances this education, although neces- 
sary, is haphazard and only partial. We send 
children to school supposedly to learn in a sys- 

164 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 165 

tematic way the occupations which constitute 
living, but to a very large extent the schools 
overlook, in the methods and subject-matter of 
their teaching, the social basis of living. In- 
stead of centering the work in the concrete, the 
human side of thirf^s, tney put the emphasis on 
the abstract, hence the work is made academic — 
unsocial. Wjrk then is no longer connected 
with a group of people all engaged in occupa- 
tions, but is isolated, selfish and individualistic. 
It is based on a conception of society which no 
longer fits the facts, an every-man-for-himself 
society which ceased to exist a hundred years 
ago. The ordinary school curriculum ignores 
the scientific democratic society of to-day and 
its needs and ideals, and goes on fitting children 
for an individualistic struggle for existence, 
softened by a little intellectual "culture" for 
the individual's enjoyment. 

Schools started in this country in pioneer 
days, when a comparatively small number of 
people were scattered over an immense country 
that offered them unlimited and unexplored op- 
portunities. The pioneer was dependent upon 
his own ability in seizing these opportunities, 
in getting ahead, in his use of nature's raw ma- 
terial. He lived much alone and for himself; 
no one was really dependent upon his relations 



166 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

with otiiers ; for there were few people, endless 
material, and unorganized communities, with- 
out traditions or institutions. The welfare of 
the country was dependent upon the spread of 
the doctrines of getj'ng on, and every man for 
himself. It was entirely natural that the new 
schools should reflect this ideal and shape their 
work to drive home the lesson. v)ur early set- 
tlers came from countries with traditions of 
culture and ''learning" ; and it was natural that 
they should look to their schools to keep alive 
these transplanted ideals in the midst of their 
struggle with nature. Culture did not mean to 
them a harmonious development of all the 
child's faculties, but it meant rather the storing 
up of historical facts and the acquiring of knowl- 
edge and the literatures of the past. Learning, 
too, did not mean finding out about the things 
around them or about what was going on in 
other parts of the world ; it meant reviewing the 
achievements of the past, learning to read the 
dead languages, the deader the language the 
greater the reputation for "learning." The 
school curriculums were principally devoted, 
therefore, to turning the eyes of the pupils to 
the past, where alone they could find things 
worth studying and where, too, they might find 
the refinements of esthetic and intellectual de- 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 167 

velopment. A knowledge of the ''three R's" 
and a little natural ''smartness" was all the 
social equipment the child needed, all the prepa- 
ration that was necessary for him to begin to 
get on in the world. Once he had that equip- 
ment the schools could then turn their attention 
to giving him culture. 

However interesting or enlightening such 
culture might be to the individual, obviously 
the first business of the public school is to teach 
the child to live in the world in which he finds 
himself, to understand his share in it, and to get 
a good start in adjusting himself to it. Only 
as he can do these things successfully will he 
have time or inclination to cultivate purely in- 
tellectual activities. 

The public schools started with the awaken- 
ing of the spirit of liberty and democracy. 
More and more people realized that there was 
no possibility of an equal chance for every 
one, if a very small minority of the population 
had entire control of the material of science, 
which was so rapidly changing all social and 
industrial conditions. Naturally enough when 
these popular schools were started, the com- 
munity turned to the schools already in exist- 
ence for their curriculum and organization. 
The old schools, however, were not conducted 



168 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

to give equal opportunity to all, but for just the 
opposite purpose, to make more marked the line 
between classes, to give the leisure and moneyed 
classes something which every one could not get, 
to cater to their desire for distinction and to 
give them occupation. 

People lived generation after generation in 
the same place, carrying on the same occupa- 
tions under the same conditions. Their world 
was so small that it did not seem to offer 
much in the way of material for a school 
education ; and what it did offer was primarily 
concerned with earning a living. But the 
schools were for people who did not earn their 
own livings, for people who wished to be ac- 
complished, polished and interesting socially, 
so the material was abstract, purposely sepa- 
rated from the concrete and the useful. Ideals 
of culture and education were and still are to 
a surprising extent based entirely upon the in- 
terests and demands of an aristocratic and 
leisure class. Having such an ideal of culture 
it was natural to the pioneers to copy the cur- 
riculum of the schools made for this ideal, even 
when the purpose of their schools was to give 
an equal industrial and social chance to all. 
From the very beginning of the public schools 
in this country the material of the curriculum 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 169 

reflected social conditions which were rapidly 
passing away : ideals of education that a feudal 
society, dependent upon its aristocracy, had de- 
veloped. 

The tremendous change in society which the 
application of science to industry brought about, 
changes which caused the French Revolution 
and the general revolution of 1848, effected a 
reconstruction of nearly all the institutions of 
civilization, the death of a great many, and 
the birth of many more. The need of pop- 
ular education was one of the results of the 
change, and with this need came the public 
schools. As their form did not adapt itself to 
the new conditions, but simply copied the schools 
already existing, the process of reconstruction 
to fit the new society is still going on, and is only 
just beginning to become conscious. A demo- 
cratic society, dependent upon applications of 
science for all its prosperity and welfare, can 
not hope to use with any great success a system 
of education which grew up for the ruling body 
in an autocratic society using only human power 
for its industries and wealth. The ever-increas- 
ing dissatisfaction with the schools and the ex- 
periments in trade and industrial training which 
are being started, are protests against clinging 
to this outworn inheritance. They are the first 



170 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

steps in the process of building a new education 
which shall really give an equal chance to every 
one, because it will base itself on the world in 
which the children live. 

There are three things about the old-fashioned 
school which must be changed if schools are to 
reflect modem society: first, the subject-matter, 
second, the way the teacher handles it, and third, 
the way the pupils handle it. The subject- 
matter will not be altered as to name. Eead- 
ing, writing, arithmetic and geography will 
always be needed, but their substance will be 
greatly altered and added to. In the first place 
modern society realizes that the care and growth 
of the body are just as important as the de- 
velopment of the mind ; more so, for the latter 
is dependent upon the former, so schools will 
become places for children to learn to live phys- 
ically as well as mentally. Again we need to 
know how to read and write nowadays so that 
we may be able to do the simplest daily actions, 
take the right street-car, avoid dangerous 
places, and keep in touch with people and 
events we can not see, and, in fact, do almost 
everything connected with our occupations. 
But the schools are still teaching reading and 
writing as if they were ends in themselves, 
simply luxuries to be acquired by pupils for 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 171 

their private edification. The same thing is 
true of geography; pupils learn boundaries, 
populations and rivers as if their object was to 
store up facts that everybody may not know. 
But in a society where railroads and steam- 
boats, newspapers and telegraph, have made 
the whole world neighbors, and where no com- 
munity is self-supporting, the desirability of 
really knowing about these neighbors is obvious. 
In other words our world has been so tre- 
mendously enlarged and complicated, our hori- 
zons so widened and our sympathies so stimu- 
lated, by the changes in our surroundings and 
habits brought about by machinery, that a 
school curriculum which does not show this 
same growth can be only very partially success- 
ful. The subject-matter of the schoolroom must 
be enlarged to take in the new elements and 
needs of society. This can be done without 
overburdening the pupils by effecting the second 
and third necessary changes. 

The complication and multiplication due to 
machinery and the increase in the mere number 
of facts that are known about things through 
scientific discoveries, make the task of master- 
ing even one subject almost impossible. When 
we consider all the facts connected with teach- 
ing the geography of our own country, the cli- 



172 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

matic and geological facts, the racial facts, tlie 
industrial and political facts, and the social and 
scientific facts, we begin to realize the hopeless- 
ness of teaching with lists of facts. Geography 
embraces nearly the entire range of human 
knowledge and endeavor. The same thing is 
true to a lesser extent of all the subjects in the 
curriculum. The great number of facts at 
our disposal in any one branch makes a mere 
classification of the principal ones seem like a 
makeshift. So teachers, instead of having their 
classes read and then recite facts from text- 
books, must change their methods. Facts 
present themselves to every one in countless 
numbers, and it is not their naming that is use- 
ful, but the ability to understand them and see 
their relation and application to each other. So 
the function of the teacher must change from 
that of a cicerone and dictator to that of a 
watcher and helper. As teachers come to watch 
their individual pupils with a view to allowing 
each one the fullest development of his thinking 
and reasoning powers, and to use the tables of 
reading, writing, and arithmetic as means of 
training the child's abilities to judge and act, 
the role of the child necessarily changes too. It 
becomes active instead of passive, the child be- 
comes the questioner and experimenter. 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 173 

It is the rare mind that can get relations or 
draw conclusions from simply hearing facts. 
Most people must see and handle things before 
they can tell how these things will behave and 
what their meaning is. The teacher then be- 
comes the one who sees that the pupils get 
proper material, and that they use it in ways 
that are true ; that is, in ways that represent re- 
lations and conditions that actually exist out- 
side the classroom. This is simply another way 
of saying that in a society where every one is 
supposed to take care of himself, and is sup- 
posed to have liberty of person and action, up to 
the point of harming others, it is pretty impor- 
tant that every one should be able to conduct 
himself, that is, to act so that he can take care of 
himself successfully. For its own sake society 
can not afford to train up its children in a way 
that blunts and dulls the quickness and accuracy 
of judgment of the baby before it begins 
school. If it does this it is increasing the num- 
ber of incompetents who will be a drag on the 
whole of society. Dogmatic methods which pre- 
scribe and make for docility and passivity not 
only become ineffective in modem society but 
they actually hinder the development of the 
largest possibilities of society. 

All the educational reformers following Rous- 



174 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

seau have looked to education as the best means 
of regenerating society. They have been fight- 
ing against the feudal and pioneer notion that 
the reason for a good education was to enable 
your children and mine to get ahead of the rest 
of the community, to give individuals another 
weapon to use in making society contribute more 
to their purse and pleasure. They have be- 
lieved that the real reason for developing the 
best possible education was to prevent just this, 
by developing methods which would give a har- 
monious development of all the powers. This 
can be done by socializing education, by making 
schools a real part of active life, not by allow- 
ing them to go their own way, shunting off all 
outside influences, and isolating themselves. 
Froebel, Pestalozzi, and their followers tried to 
effect just this linking up with society which 
would result in the development of a social spirit 
in every one. But they did not have the means 
for making their schools embryo communities. 
The demand for popular education was still so 
small that the community was not willing to 
recognize the schools as an integral part, and 
the idea that children were anything but minia- 
ture grown-ups, was still so new that successful 
methods of handling groups of children had not 
been developed. The role of the community in 



EELATION OF THE SCHOOL 175 

making the schools vital is just as important as 
the role of the school itself. For in a com- 
munity where schools are looked upon as iso- 
lated institutions, as a necessary convention, 
the school will remain largely so in spite of the 
most skillful methods of teaching. But a com- 
munity that demands something visible from its 
schools, that recognizes the part they play in 
the welfare of the whole just as it recognizes 
its police and fire departments, that uses the 
energies and interest of its youthful citizens, 
not simply controlling their time until they are 
prepared to be turned out as citizens — such a 
community will have social schools, and what- 
ever its resources, it will have schools that de- 
velop community spirit and interests. 

A great deal has been written lately about the 
public school system at Gary, Ind., with special 
reference to the novel features of school ad- 
ministration that are being worked out there, or 
else with emphasis on the opportunities for in- 
dustrial training. But the biggest idea there 
is the one behind these new features. It is the 
social and community idea. Mr. Wirt, the su- 
perintendent of schools, has had an opportunity 
to make the schools of the steel town almost 
from the very beginning of the town, and he 
has wanted to do it right. He did not visit the 



176 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

most famous schools all over the country or send 
for the best school architect; instead he stayed 
right at home, and forgetting what had or had 
not been done in other places, he tried to make 
the best possible schools for Gary. The ques- 
tion he tried to answer was this : What did the 
Gary children need to make them good citizens 
and happy and prosperous human beings, and 
how could the money available for educational 
purposes supply all these needs! The indus- 
trial features of his schools will be taken up 
later, but it may be well to point out in passing 
that they were not instituted to turn out good 
workers for the steel company, nor to save the 
factories the expense of training their own 
workers, but for the educational value of the 
work they involved. In the same way it would 
be a mistake to consider the Gary schools simply 
as an attempt to take the unpromising immi- 
grant child and turn him into a self-supporting 
immigrant, or as an attempt to meet the demand 
of an industrial class for a certain sort of train- 
ing. 

Mr. Wirt found himself the superintendent of 
schools in an American town, responsible for 
thousands of children coming from all sorts of 
surroundings. It was his problem to take care 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 177 

of them for a number of years in such a way 
that at the end of the time each child would be 
able to find his own job and do it successfully, 
whether this was feeding a machine or managing 
a business, whether it was taking care of a family 
or working in an office, or teaching school. His 
problem is not to give the special informa- 
tion each one may need for the details of his 
work, but to keep the natural interests and en- 
thusiasms of childhood, to enable each pupil to 
gain control of his mind and body, and to insure 
his being able to do the rest for himself. To be 
successful as a human being and an American 
citizen, is the goal that the public schools of the 
country have set for their pupils: earning a 
living forms part of this ideal, and follows as a 
matter of course if the larger training is suc- 
cessful. There are many factors to be con- 
sidered in deciding on the best ways of reaching 
this goal: such as the individual peculiarities 
of every child that goes to school; the people 
that will teach ; the neighborhood in which the 
child lives; and the larger community which 
pays for the schools. Mr. Wirt's plan takes ad- 
vantage to their full value of the contributions 
each one has to make to the whole scheme. 
Each factor is a contributory asset; without it 



178 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the others could not perform their work ; there- 
fore it means a weak spot in the result if any- 
thing is overlooked. 

A tremendous waste in the organization of 
the ordinary public school appears at the first 
glance to a critic who is seeking to spend the 
school taxes with the greatest possible benefit 
to the children and to the taxpayers. The en- 
tire school equipment of building, yard, and 
supplies stands empty for half of every school 
day, besides summer vacation and Saturdays. 
The buildings are expensive and for the greater 
part of the time are not in use at all. This is an 
extravagance in itself, but when we consider the 
way the average child who goes to public school 
in town or city spends the hours when he is not 
in school, and the very incomplete education he 
gets during the school hours, we begin to realize 
just how serious this extravagance is. Mr. 
Wirt decided to keep the schools open all day 
in Gary, so that the children would not be forced 
to spend the greater part of their time playing 
in the alleys and on crowded street corners, ex- 
posed to all the dangers to health and morals 
that such places offer for the loiterer. Still the 
buildings would be closed for many hours a day 
and for many weeks, and he decided that the 
people who built the buildings — the tax-payers 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 179 

— ought to have a chance to use them for public 
purposes during this time, so the Gary schools 
have evening school, Saturday classes, and sum- 
mer sessions. This makes the up-keep of the 
buildings much more expensive than having 
them open for a few months only, therefore 
some way of running the plant more econom- 
ically must be discovered. 

Children can not sit still all day at their desks 
as they do for five hours in most schools ; there- 
fore other things must be provided for them to 
do if they are to keep well and busy during eight 
hours of school. The Gary buildings obtain this 
necessary economy by using a building for twice 
as many pupils as the ordinary building is sup- 
posed to be able to take care of. There are two 
schools in every house, one from eight to three 
and the other from nine to four, and each takes 
its turn at the regular classrooms during alter- 
nate hours, the remaining half of the day being 
spent in the various occupations that make Gary 
unique. In this way enough money is saved to 
equip shops and pay extra teachers for the sub- 
jects that supplement the regular curriculum, 
and to pay for the extra sessions. Thus with 
taxes of ordinary size the people of Gary get 
schools that utilize the children's time, and 
give them greatly increased facilities for learn- 



180 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

ing, besides offering tlie adults of tlie community 
opportunities for special courses in evening 
school. At present in Gary the number of 
adults using the school buildings is greater than 
the number of children, though of course the 
number of hours they attend school is much 
shorter. By having two duplicate schools in 
every building one half the usual cost per class- 
room is saved, and enough money to supply 
healthy activities for the children for eight 
hours a day and to keep the schools open even- 
ings, holidays and Sundays for adults is ob- 
tained. 

Each building is equipped with a gymnasium, 
swimming pool, and playground, and has phys- 
ical directors that are in attendance for the en- 
tire eight hours. Physical training is as much 
a part of the regular school work as anything 
else, and besides the work that is part of every 
pupil's program there are two hours a day when 
the playground is open for the children to use 
as they please. Instead of going to the streets 
to play, the children stay in the school and use 
the play opportunities it offers. For the most 
part the physical training takes the form of 
supervised play and apparatus work. Experi- 
mentation has shown here as in so many other 
places that the pupils are not really interested 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 181 

in the formal group exercises, and that they go 
through with them under compulsion and so 
lose most of the benefit. So for the gymnastic 
drill, swimming pool, tennis courts, and appa- 
ratus are largely substituted. The directors 
see that the individual gets the special exercise 
that he needs so that the work does not lose its 
orderliness or effectiveness, and besides getting 
physical development suited to his needs, every 
child has a healthy and pleasant place to play 
or otherwise spend his time outdoors. 

The Gary pupil is expected to gain physically 
during the school year just as he is expected to 
keep up with his grade in his other work. Each 
child is examined by a doctor, and the pupils who 
are not strong enough for the strain of the class- 
room work are not sent home to do nothing 
until they are stronger, but are kept in school 
and given a program suited to their strength, 
their classroom time is cut down to a minimum, 
and they spend most of the day on the play- 
ground or in the gymnasium, doing the sort of 
things the doctor says they need to get strong. 
The physical growth of the pupils is just as im- 
portant as the mental, and by devoting the same 
care to it that is given to the child's progress 
through the grades, the schools go a long way 
towards making themselves a small community 



182 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

whicli gives every opportunity for a normal and 
natural life. 

The schools are open eight hours a day, but 
the grade teachers teach for only six hours, 
while the physical directors are on duty for the 
whole time. Four hours of each school's time 
is given to the regular classroom work or labora- 
tories, and one hour for the auditorium and one 
hour for ' ' application ' ' or play. Then there are 
the other two hours when the children may use 
the play facilities if they wish, and they all do 
use them. By rotating the classes the number of 
teachers does not have to be increased, and the 
pupils get the benefit of teachers especially 
trained for the subject they are teaching. By 
dividing each school into groups of pupils 
the classes are smaller than in most public 
schools. For the first two hours in the morn- 
ing — from 8 :15 to 10 :15 — one school has the use 
of the classrooms, studios, shops and labora- 
tories, one group in a recitation room for the 
first hour and in the shops for the second, the 
second group beginning with the shop work. 
The other school uses the playground for the 
first hour and attendance is not compulsory, for 
the second hour one group goes to the audi- 
torium and the other remains on the playground 
for systematic gymnastics or has an ''applica- 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 183 

tion" period. Then at 10:15 the first school 
goes to the auditorium and playgrounds for its 
work and the second school takes possession of 
the class and shop rooms for two hours. 
Grades one to five have two hours daily in reg- 
ular classrooms for formal instruction in lan- 
guage, history, literature, and mathematics. 
Grades six to twelve have three hours daily for 
this formal instruction. The additional hour is 
taken from the play and application periods. 
Grades one to five have one hour of laboratory 
work in science or shop work in industrial train- 
ing, thirty minutes for music or literature, and 
thirty minutes for physical training. Grades 
six to twelve have the entire two hours for shop 
work in industrial training, laboratory work in 
science, or music and drawing. 

By this scheme of alternation of classes and 
schools twice the number of children that are 
usually cared for in one building are taken care 
of in smaller classes by teachers who are 
specialists in their subjects. For besides the 
industrial teachers, there are teachers for 
French, German, history, mathematics, litera- 
ture, music, art, nature study, and the sciences. 
This additional efficiency is paid for by the sav- 
ing on buildings effected by the two school sys- 
tems. Each grade room is used by at least four 



184 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

different classes, so each child does not have a 
desk where he keeps his things and belongings, 
but has a locker for his books and changes his 
classroom at the end of the hour. No one 
teacher is responsible for one set of pupils, but 
for her own work, and in the same way the 
pupils are responsible for themselves. Obvi- 
ously such a scheme as this requires a real spirit 
of cooperation among the pupils and teachers, 
and also good business management. 

Mr. Wirt believes that lack of just this has 
been one of the reasons why the public schools 
have lost so many of the opportunities that 
Gary is using. Running a big institution suc- 
cessfully from the business end is a large order 
in itself, and Mr. Wirt feels that school princi- 
pals and supervisors have been too greatly 
handicapped in being expected to do this busi- 
ness while carrying out an educational program. 
He believes that the school principal or superin- 
tendent should be a business manager, an admin- 
istrative officer simply for the building or for 
the city. The educational policy of the schools, 
the program, and methods should be looked out 
for by experts who are free from the details of 
administration. These supervising educators 
should not be appointed for districts but for 
subjects, and should move their offices from time 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 185 

to time from one school to another, so that they 
may really keep in touch with all the work in 
their subject, and so that no one school will be 
overstrong in one subject. These supervisors 
should act as the educational principals of the 
schools where they have their offices for the 
time, and the whole body of supervisors arrange 
the curricula for all the schools. Gary has too 
few schools as yet to enable the completion of 
such a plan, but the present organization shows 
the same broad-mindedness and desire to get the 
cooperation and value of all the work of all the 
teachers through the system, from the newest 
assistant to the superintendent himself. 

In discipline, in social life, and in the cur- 
riculum the Gary schools are doing everything 
possible, in cooperation with church and home, 
to use to the best educational purpose every 
resource of money, organizatian and neighbor- 
hood influence. The school is a small com- 
munity in its discipline, and a democratic one. 
The work is so well arranged that the children 
want to go to school; there is no need to drag 
them with truant officers or overawe them by a 
show of stern authority. Once in the school 
building they feel at home and take the same 
interest and responsibility in the work that they 
take in their own homes. Each child knows 



186 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

what all the other children and classes are doing, 
for all the children are constantly meeting in 
the locker rooms or as they pass through the 
halls for their change of classroom at the end 
of every hour. The auditorium and the system 
of visiting classes, and the repairing and manu- 
facturing of school equipment by the students, 
are strong factors in creating the spirit that 
prevails among the scholars. There is a stu- 
dent council in each school elected by .the 
students to attend to the interests of the student 
body and to the order of the building. There 
are health campaigns carried on by the school 
doctors cooperating through the school printing 
press with the English classes and the audi- 
torium periods. The children take such a keen 
interest in these, and work so hard that there is 
a larger percent, of contagious diseases among 
the children under school age than among those 
in school, in spite of the greater chances for con- 
tagion among the latter. Instead of simply en- 
forcing the health laws, the school authorities 
tell the children what the laws are, why they 
were made and how they can help to keep down 
contagion and all sorts of sickness; in chem- 
istry and cooking the pupils are taught enough 
about germs and physiology so that they under- 
stand what contagion and dirt mean. The re- 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 187 

suit is that the children themselves take every 
precaution to prevent sickness, and when a 
classmate is sick they see to it that quarantine 
is enforced and that the school doctor is notified. 

The schools have carried on a pure milk cam- 
paign in the same way ; the pupils brought sam- 
ples of milk from home and tested it, and then 
saw that their parents did something about it 
if impurities were found. An anti-fly campaign 
goes on all the time and meets with a real re- 
sponse from the children. In the matter of 
health the schools not only do their share as a 
part of the whole community, they do more than 
this, acting as assistants to the board of health 
and getting rid of the prejudice and fear of 
city doctors which is so common in our foreign 
communities, and which makes it so hard to keep 
down disease and take care of school children. 
Once the cooperation and understanding of the 
children is gained by the city doctors, it is not 
hard to have their adenoids or eyes attended to. 
The children know why these things need to be 
done even if their parents do not, and they see 
to it that the parents are kept from interfering 
and that they help. 

Another difficult problem for the public 
schools in an industrial community with a for- 
eign population is to keep the children in school 



188 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

after the legal age at which they may leave. 
The Gary schools go about this just as they 
attack the question of public health, not by 
making more rules or trying compulsion, but 
by getting the children themselves to help, by 
making the schools so obviously useful for each 
individual that he wants to stay. There are no 
'^High Schools" in Gary! A pupil goes to 
school in one building from the day he enters 
kindergarten until he is ready for college or 
until he goes into business or the factory. 
There is no graduation with a celebration and 
a diploma at the end of the eighth grade. When 
a pupil begins the ninth grade his program 
deviates from the plan of previous years, but 
otherwise there is nothing done to make the 
child think he has gone as far as he needs, that 
from now on he will simply be getting frills and 
luxuries. The teachers do not change. The 
same history, language and literature teachers 
conduct all the grades; and in the shops the 
pupils get a chance to learn some one thing 
thoroughly. The pupils do not look forward to 
the last four years of school with dread of a 
hard and useless grind, they look at it as a con- 
tinuation of their school life, getting harder 
from year to year as their own ability increases. 
And especially they regard this period as an 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 189 

opportunity to get training whose immediate 
value they can see. The arguments of the 
school to persuade the pupils to stay in school 
are practical, telling arguments, things the chil- 
dren can see. The school press prints from 
time to time bulletins explaining to the pupils 
and their parents the opportunities that the 
Gary schools offer in the way of general educa- 
tion and of special training. These bulletins 
give statistics and information about the oppor- 
tunities in the different fields of work ; they show 
the boys and girls in figures the relative posi- 
tions and salaries of high-school graduates and 
those who leave school at fourteen — as they ap- 
pear one, two, or ten years after leaving school. 
Business men come to the schools and tell the 
students what the chances for graduates and 
non-graduates are in their business and why 
they want better educated employees. Sta- 
tistics of Gary pupils are kept and shown to the 
pupils. The usual break between the eighth 
grade and high school does not exist, and, there- 
fore, parents do not think it necessary to take 
their children out of school. They find that the 
sacrifices they have made to keep the children in 
can be kept up for a few years more. If chil- 
dren are going to learn a trade better by stay- 
ing in school than by leaving, and if children are 



190 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

keen to continue in school with definite plans 
for the future, even the most poverty-stricken 
parent is unwilling to thwart the advantage of 
his children. It is well known that in big cities 
where the proportion of pupils who leave school 
at fourteen is overwhelming, and where the 
usual reason given is that the parents need the 
financial help of the children, the real reason 
for defection is the indifference of the pupils 
themselves to school. The almost invariable 
answer given by the child to the question, ''Why 
did you leave school?" is, ''Because I did not 
like it." This fact taken with the poverty at 
home is enough to make them leave school at 
the first chance. Give the child work that he 
recognizes as interesting and valuable and a 
chance to play, and his hatred of school will 
speedily be forgotten. 

The inflexibility of the ordinary public school 
tends to push the pupils out of school instead 
of keeping them in. The curriculum does not 
fit them, and there is no way of making it fit 
without upsetting the entire organization of the 
school. One failure sets a pupil back in all his 
work, and he soon gets the feeling that his own 
efforts are not important, because the school 
machinery works on at the same rate, regardless 
of any individual pupil or study. Indifference 



EELATION OF THE SCHOOL 191 

or dislike is almost surely the result of feeling 
that work is making no impression, that the 
machine for which he is working is not after all 
affected or dependent upon his work. In Gary 
organization has been made to fit each individual 
child, and is flexible enough so that even the 
most difiicult pupil can not upset its working. 
The child and the school get along together. 
We have explained in an earlier paragraph how 
the two-school system works so that an individ- 
ual can spend more or less time on any one sub- 
ject, or can drop it altogether. The child who is 
weak physically spends much of his time on the 
playground, while the child who is weak in 
arithmetic or geography can take these lessons 
with both schools or even with a grade below, 
and hundreds of children in the same building 
can make the same sort of change in their pro- 
gram without disturbing the orderly conduct of 
the school routine. A pupil who is stronger in 
one subject than in the rest of his work, can 
take that subject with a higher grade. The 
pupil who is losing interest in school and fall- 
ing behind in most of his studies, or who is be- 
ginning to talk of leaving, is not punished for 
this lack of interest by being put still further 
back. His teachers find out in what he is good 
and give him plenty of time to work at it, and 



192 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

to get ahead in it so that his interest in his work 
is stimulated. If he later wakes up to an in- 
terest in the regular school program, so much 
the better. Every facility is given him to catch 
up with his grade in all the work. If this 
awakening does not come, the boy or girl has 
still been kept in school until he or she learned 
some one thing, probably the one most suited to 
the pupil's ability, instead of leaving or failing 
entirely by being held back in everything until 
even the one strong faculty died and the pupil 
was without either training or the moral stim- 
ulus of success. 

The school program is reorganized every two 
months and the pupil may change his entire pro- 
gram at any one of these times, instead of hav- 
ing to struggle along for half a year with work 
that is too hard or too easy or not properly ap- 
portioned. For administrative convenience the 
schools still keep the grade classifications, but 
pupils are classified not according to the grade 
number, but as ''rapid," ''average," and 
' ' slow ' ' workers. Rapid pupils finish the twelve 
years of school at about sixteen years of age, 
average workers at eighteen, and slow workers 
at twenty. This classification does not describe 
the quality of work done. The slow worker may 
be a more thorough scholar than the rapid 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 193 

worker. The classification is used not to distin- 
guish between the abilities of scholars, but to 
take advantage of the natural growth of the 
child by letting his work keep abreast with it. 
The rapid child moves as quickly as possible 
from grade to grade instead of being held back 
until his work has no stimulus for him, and the 
slow worker is not pushed into work before he is 
ready for it. Does this flexible system work 
successfully or does it result in easy-going, 
slap-dash methods? We have only to visit the 
schools and see the pupils hard at work, each 
one responsible for his own movements through 
the day, to be convinced that the children are 
happy and interested; while from the point of 
view of the teacher and educator, the answer is 
even more positively favorable, when we consult 
the school records. Fifty-seven per cent, of all the 
school children in Gary who are thirteen years 
old are in the seventh grade or above it. This 
is a better showing than most industrial com- 
munities can make, and means that the majority 
of all the Gary school children go through school 
at about the same rate as the average pupil who 
is preparing for college. Even more remark- 
able than this are the figures regarding the 
pupils who have gone on to higher schools or 
colleges after leaving the Gary schools. One- 



194 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

third of all tbe pupils that have left the Gary 
schools during the eight years of their exist- 
ence are now in the state university, in an en- 
gineering school, or a business college. When 
we remember that the population of Gary is 
made up principally of laborers in the steel 
mills, and is sixty per cent, foreign born, and 
compare with this the usual school history of 
the second generation in this country, we realize 
how successful Mr. Wirt has been in making a 
system which meets the needs of the pupils, a 
system that appeals to the community as so good 
that they want to go on and get more education 
than mere necessity requires. 

The motive back of these changes from the 
routine curriculum is always a social one. Mr. 
Wirt believes that if the social end of the 
school is properly emphasized the pedagogical 
will take care of itself. The public schools 
must study the needs and qualities of its pupils, 
the needs of the community and the opportuni- 
ties that the community contributes to the 
schools' welfare. We have seen how the phys- 
ical life of the child and the health of the com- 
munity are used in the school curriculum, so as 
to make the curriculum more interesting, and 
for the good of the community as well. This 
same close connection is kept up between the 



EELATION OF THE SCHOOL 195 

school work and other community interests and 
matters of daily life. Every advantage is taken 
of the social instincts of children in the teach- 
ing. Instead of isolating each grade and cut- 
ting off the younger children from the older, the 
two are thrown together as much as possible. 
The younger grades use the laboratories and 
shops which would be an unwarranted extrava- 
gance if the high-school pupils were not in the 
same buildings and using them also for tech- 
nical training. They use them not only for be- 
ginning lessons in science or manual training, 
but they go into them when the older classes are 
working there to act as helpers or as an audi- 
ence for the higher grades. Fourth and fifth 
grade pupils thus assist seventh, eighth, and 
ninth grade students in shops, studios, and lab- 
oratories. 

The older children learn responsibility and 
cooperation from having to look out for the 
little people, and the latter learn an astonish- 
ing amount about the subject from waiting on, 
watching, and asking questions of the older 
pupils. Both grades find out what is going 
on in the school and get thereby a large feel- 
ing of fellowship, while the interest of the lower 
one grows and finds reasons for staying in school. 
The work of the older children is used, wher- 



196 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

ever it is feasible, in teaching the lower grades. 
Maps and charts made in drawing are used for 
less advanced pupils in nature study or geog- 
raphy; the printing shop makes the spelling 
lists and problem sheets for the whole school; 
the doctor in his health campaigns calls in the 
art and English workers to make posters and 
pamphlets. The halls of the schools are hung 
with notices of what is going on in the school, 
with especially good and interesting drawings 
or maps, with information about what is being 
made in the different shops, or about anything 
that the whole school ought to see or know. 

Another strong element in making public 
opinion is the auditorium, where every pupil in 
the school spends one hour each day, sometimes 
for choral singing, sometimes to hear an older 
grade tell about an interesting experiment in 
physics, to find out from a cooking class about 
cheap and nutritious bills of fare, or to hear the 
doctor tell how the school can improve the 
health conditions in its home neighborhoods. 
The auditorium period is for the use of the 
general community as well. Ministers, politi- 
cians, any one in the city who is doing anything 
interesting, may come in and tell the children 
about it. The school invites all social agencies 
in the neighborhood to come in in this way. 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 197 

The hour for ''application" contributes to the 
same end. The children go to the nearest 
public library to read or to look up references 
for their class work, or simply for a lesson on 
the use of library books; or they may go to 
the neighboring Y. M. C. A. building to use the 
gymnasium or to listen to a lecture; or they 
may go to any church or club that ojffers re- 
ligious instruction desired by the parents. The 
school is a social clearing house for the neigh- 
borhood. The application period is also used 
to supplement the, regular classroom studies by 
means of practical work in the shops or on the 
playground. Thus an arithmetic class may get 
a lesson in applied mathematics by laying out 
the foundation for a house on the playground, 
or by spending an hour in the school store, a 
room fitted up like a grocery store, where the 
children get practice in mental and oral arith- 
metic and in English by playing ' ' store. * ' The 
application period may also be spent in doing 
work for the school building. Thus an older 
pupil, studying stenography and typewriting or 
bookkeeping, might go to the school office and 
do an hour of real work, helping one of the 
clerks. The boys in the fifth grade put in this 
time in tending the school storeroom. They 
take entire charge of the school supplies, check 



198 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

up all the material sent in by the board and 
distributing it through the building to the 
teachers and janitors. The records of the 
pupils in the different shops are kept by other 
pupils in their application time. One paid 
bookkeeper has general charge of an office, 
where the pupils come with printed slips filled 
out by the shop teacher, giving them credit for 
so much time at a certain rate of skill ; the pupil 
clerks give the pupils credit on their record for 
this work and keep all the records. Pupils also 
run a post office for the building, and the writer 
saw a sixth grade boy delivering salary checks 
and collecting receipts for them through the 
building. Children who do this kind of work 
are not only learning arithmetic and book- 
keeping, they are learning as well responsibility 
and reliability. They get an appreciation of 
what their school means, and are made wide- 
awake to its welfare; they learn that they are 
the real school, identical with its interests. 

The school lunch room is conducted by the 
cooking department. When the Emerson 
School was first built it was equipped with the 
regulation cooking school desks, individual gas 
burners, tables and lockers. All this has since 
been turned into a serving table where student 
waiters serve the food they have cooked — real 



RELATION OF THE SCHOOL 199 

lunches to their fellow students, who pay a stu- 
dent cashier. The younger girls get their 
cooking lessons by going to the older girls' 
cooking lessons as helpers and watchers. The 
girls do all the menu planning and buying for 
the lunch room and keep the accounts. They 
have to pay expenses and serve menus that 
come up to the standard set by the chemistry 
department, where they have analyzed food and 
made tables of comparative values. The result 
is steaming hot food, nourishing and weH 
cooked, sold very cheaply. The daily menu is 
posted with the price of each article and its 
food value, and the walls of the lunch room are 
hung with posters and charts showing the rela- 
tive values of foodstuffs, sample menus for 
cheap and nourishing meals, and the extrava- 
gance of poor food. These have all been made 
by the cooking school students and are the re- 
sult of actual experimentation. 

Gary schools do not teach civics out of a text- 
book. Pupils learn civics by helping to take 
care of their own school building, by making 
the rules for their own conduct in the halls and 
on the playgrounds, by going into the public 
library, and by listening to the stories of what 
Gary is doing as told by the people who are 
doing it. They learn by a mock campaign, with 



200 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

parties, primaries, booths and ballots for tbe 
election of their own student council. Pupils 
who have made the furniture and the cement 
walks with their own hands, and who know how 
much it cost, are slow to destroy walks or furni- 
ture, nor are they going to be very easily fooled 
as to the value they get in service and improve- 
ments when they themselves become taxpayers. 
The health campaigns, the application work 
which takes them to the social agencies, of the 
city, the auditorium periods when they learn 
more about their city, all give civics lessons that 
make their own appeal. The children can see 
the things with their own eyes ; they are learn- 
ing citizenship by being good citizens. 

The value of this practical civics is doubly 
great because of the large number of children 
with foreign parents, who know nothing about 
the government or organization of the city in 
which they are living, and who, because they do 
not understand what they see about them, can- 
not know its possibilities and limitations. The 
parents learn nothing of the laws until they 
break them, of public health until they endanger 
it, nor of social resources until they want some- 
thing. They are naturally suspicious of gov- 
ernment and social authority in consequence, 
and it is very important that their children 



EELATION OF THE SCHOOL 201 

should have some real knowledge on which to 
base a sounder judgment. Besides giving them 
this, the schools try to teach American standards 
of living to the pupils and so to their parents. 
On entering school every pupil gives the school 
office, besides the usual name, age, and address, 
certain information about his family, its size, 
its resources, and the character of the home he 
lives in. This record is kept in the school and 
transferred if the child moves out of the school 
district. Every grade teacher takes a certain 
number of squares in the school district, and 
they make plans of this area. The children 
make a large scale map, with streets, walks, 
lamp posts and mail boxes, locating every house, 
barn, or shed and every empty lot. This is 
altered as changes are made. Every child 
brings measurements of the rooms in his home 
and draws a floor plan of his house. These 
plans are kept with the teacher's map of her 
district, so that she has a complete map of the 
neighborhood and home of every child living in 
it. By comparing these with any family record, 
it is a simple matter to tell if the family are 
living under proper moral and hygienic condi- 
tions. 

The teacher has a district small enough to 
know it thoroughly, and as far as possible she 



202 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

gets acquainted with all the children living in 
it. If bad conditions are due to ignorance or 
poverty, the teacher finds out what can h& done 
to remedy them, and sees to it that the family 
learn how they can better themselves. If con- 
ditions are very bad, neighborhood public 
opinion is worked up through the other children 
on the block. From time to time an auditorium 
period is devoted to showing these maps and 
pointing out the good and bad features of blocks 
and neighborhoods. Children always carry the 
news home to their parents, and as rents and 
accommodations are freely discussed, these re- 
ports are often acted upon. The parents are 
encouraged to come to the school and ask for 
information, and on more than one occasion 
some newly arrived family has moved from an 
overcrowded rear shack to a comfortable flat 
with the same rent because through the children 
they found out that their bad quarters were 
unnecessary. Because the school does this 
work to help, and as part of its regular pro- 
gram, it is accepted by the children and their 
parents as a matter of course. Information 
about improvements, sanitation, the size and 
comfort of the houses, and the rents, is given 
to the parents. If a block is poor a good block 



EELATION OF THE SCHOOL 203 

near by where conditions are better and the 
rents the same, is shown them. Thus the 
schools not only teach the theory of good citi- 
zenship and social conditions, they give the chil- 
dren actual facts and conditions, so that they 
can see what is wrong and how it can be bet- 
tered. 

Gary schools use the community as much as 
possible as a contributor to the educational fa- 
cilities, and in so doing they give good return 
in immediate results, besides the larger return 
in alert and intelligent citizens. Conditions in 
Gary are not ideal. The schools have no larger 
sums to spend than any city of its size, the 
teachers might be found in any other town, and 
the pupils come for the most part from homes 
that offer their children no training, while the 
parents are trying to adjust themselves to en- 
tirely new surroundings. But these schools 
have done much by showing a good business 
management, by spending the taxpayers' money 
in an economical way so as to give the younger 
generation the largest possible facilities for 
spending their time profitably. The results of 
the system as seen in the school buildings and 
playgrounds, the alert and happy students, and 
the statistics of their progress through school as 



204 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

well as their careers afterwards, are doubly in- 
spiring just because they have been accom- 
plished with the resources available in any 
public school. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE SCHOOL AS A SOCIAL SETTLEMENT 

Schools all over the country are finding that 
the most direct way of vitalizing their work is 
through closer relations with local interests and 
occupations. That period of American school 
history which was devoted to building up uni- 
formity of subject-matter, method, and admin- 
istration, was obliged to neglect everything 
characteristic of the local environment, for at- 
tention to that meant deviation from uniform- 
ity. Things remote in time and space, and 
things of an abstract nature, are most readily 
reduced to uniformity and doled out in doses 
to children in a mass. Unfortunately the 
consequences were too often that in aiming to 
hit all children by exactly the same educational 
ammunition, none of them were really deeply 
touched. Efforts to bring the work into vital 
connection with pupils' experiences necessarily 
began to vary school materials to meet the spe- 
cial needs and definite features of local life. 

This closer contact with immediate neighbor- 

205 



206 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

hood conditions not only enriches school work 
and strengthens motive force in the pupils, but 
it increases the service rendered to the com- 
munity. No school can make use of the activi- 
ties of the neighborhood for purposes of in- 
struction without this use influencing, in turn, 
the people of the neighborhood. Pupils, for 
example, who learn civics by making local sur- 
veys and working for local improvements, are 
certain to influence the life of the locality, while 
lessons in civics learned from the purely gen- 
eral statements of a text-book are much less 
likely to have either applicability or applica- 
tion. In turn, the community perceives the 
local efficiency of the schools. It realizes that 
the service rendered to welfare is not remote, 
to appear when the pupils become adults, but a 
part of the regular, daily course of education. 
The statement that the schools exist for a demo- 
cratic purpose, for the good of citizenship, be- 
comes an obvious fact and not a formula. A 
community which perceives what a strong fac- 
tor its school is in civic activities, is quick to 
give support and assistance in return, either by 
extending the use of its own facilities (as hap- 
pens in Gary) or by the direct assistance of 
labor, money, or material when these are needed. 
The super^^ising principal of public school 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 207 

No. 26 in Indianapolis is trying an experiment 
unlike any other known to us in an effort to 
make his plant a true school; that is, a place 
where the children of his neighborhood shall 
become healthy, happy, and competent both 
economically and socially, and where the con- 
nection of instruction with the life of the com- 
munity shall be directly recognized both by 
children and parents. Mr. Valentine's school 
is located in the poor, crowded colored district 
of the city and has only colored pupils. It is 
not an attempt to solve the ''race question" nor 
yet an experiment suited only to colored people. 
There is nothing in the school not entirely prac- 
tical in any district where the children come 
from homes with limited resources and meager 
surroundings. A visitor when leaving this 
school can not fail to wish that such ventures 
might be started in all our great cities, — indeed 
in any community where people need to be 
aroused to a sense of their needs, including the 
fact that if they are to contribute to the best 
interests of the community, they must be taught 
how to earn a living, and how to use their re- 
sources for themselves and their neighbors both 
in leisure time and in working hours. Mr. 
Valentine's school is a school for colored chil- 
dren only in the sense that the work has been 



208 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

arranged in relation to the conditions in the 
neighborhood; these modify the needs of the 
particular children who are the pupils. Yet 
the success of the experiment would mean a 
real step forward in solving the "race ques- 
tion" and peculiar problems of any immigrant 
district as well. Mr. Valentine is not interested 
in illustrating any theories on these points, but 
in making up for gaps in the home life of the 
pupils ; giving them opportunities to prepare for 
a better future ; in supplying plenty of healthy 
occupation and recreation; and in seeing to it 
that their school work reacts at once to improve 
neighborhood conditions. 

Mr. Valentine's school is really a social set- 
tlement for the neighborhood, but it has a de- 
cided advantage over the average settlement, 
for it comes in contact with all the children liv- 
ing within its district for a number of hours 
each day, while most settlements reach the chil- 
dren for only a few scattered hours each week. 
The school has a larger influence than most 
settlements because it is a public institution 
for which the people who use it are paying their 
share; they feel that their relation to it is a 
business one, not a matter of philanthropy. 
Because of this businesslike relation the school 
is able really to teach the doctrines of social 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 209 

welfare. In any settlement the work is always 
handicapped by the fact that the people who make 
use of it feel that they are receiving something 
for which they do not pay, that something is 
being done for them by people who are better 
off financially than they are. But giving a com- 
munity facilities that it lacks for special classes 
and recreation through the public school of the 
district put the work on a different basis. The 
school is really the property of the people of 
the district ; they feel that they are more or less 
responsible for what is done there. Any wider 
activities that a school may undertake are to a 
certain extent the work of the people them- 
selves ; they are simply making use of the school 
plant for their own needs. 

The neighborhood around Mr. Valentine's 
school is one of the poorest in Indianapolis, 
and once had a bad reputation for lawlessness 
and disorder as well. The school had struggled 
along for years with little or no support from 
the community as a whole or from individual 
parents. The per cent, of truancy was high, and 
a large number of cases were sent to the ju- 
venile court each year. The children took no 
interest in their work as a whole, and cases of 
extreme disorder were not infrequent; one 
pupil tried to revenge himself on his teacher 



210 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

for a merited punishment with a butcher's knife, 
in another case it was necessary to arrest a 
boy's father as a lesson to the neighborhood. 
Besides this attitude of hostility and of unwill- 
ing attendance, the school had to contend with 
immoral surroundings which finally made it 
necessary to do something to isolate the school 
building from neighboring houses. Finally the 
school board bought the tract of land and 
wooden tenements around the school building. 
It was at first proposed to tear down the old 
buildings, but the authorities were persuaded 
to turn them over to the school for its use. The 
school now found itself the possessor of a large 
playground and of three frame tenements in 
the worst possible condition, the board having 
stipulated that this added property should mean 
no further expense to the city after its purchase 
and the cleaning up of the grounds. It was 
decided to use the buildings for social and in- 
dustrial purposes. One of them was fitted up 
by the pupils and neighbors interested as a 
manual training building. In this there is a 
carpenter shop, a sewing room, and a room for 
the class in shoemaking. Each grade devotes a 
regular number of hours a week to hand work, 
and has an opportunity to join other industrial 
classes after school. The immediate practical 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 211 

appeal of the work is never lost sight of, and 
the work is arranged to fit the needs of the 
individual pupil. 

The carpenter shop is open all day, and there 
are classes for the girls as well as for the boys. 
Pupils are at liberty to go into the shop and 
work whenever they have any free time. The 
work is not confined to exercises to train the 
child in the use of tools, but each pupil makes 
something that he needs or wants, something 
that will be of real use to him. Processes and 
control of tools are taught the pupil by means 
of the piece of work he is doing. This is the 
keynote to all the industrial work done in the 
school. The more remote end of teaching the 
child processes which will be useful to him later 
is not lost sight of, but material is always used 
which has some immediate value to the child or 
to the school. The boys have learned carpentry 
work by making things that were needed in the 
school building — tables, cupboards, and book- 
cases — and by doing some of the repairing on 
the building. The girls have learned to sew by 
making clothes for themselves, for their 
brothers and sisters, and by making curtains 
and linen for the school. They have learned to 
cook by making soup for hot lunches for the 
school and the neighbors, and by cooking a whole 



212 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

meal for their own class. Besides the cooking 
and sewing department for the girls, there is a 
class in millinery and in crocheting. These two 
classes are conducted from the commercial point 
of view, to teach the girls to do something that 
will enable them to earn some money. In the 
millinery class the pupils start by making and 
trimming hats for themselves, so that they learn 
the different processes in the trade. The girls 
in the class who show the most skill are then 
allowed to take orders from friends and neigh- 
bors and trim or make hats for them. Besides 
the cost of the material the buyer pays a very 
small sum for the work, and this goes into the 
school treasury. The millinery class has done 
quite a business in the neighborhood, and turned 
out some very successful hats. Crocheting is 
taught as a trade, and any girl who wishes to 
make some money has an opportunity to learn 
how to make lace, table doilies, and all sorts of 
crocheted articles, like hoods, etc., which will 
sell. As the girls are learning, they are working 
on something which they can use for themselves 
or in their homes. 

The work for the boys is arranged in the same 
way. Besides the carpenter work and the re- 
pairing there is a boys' cooking class, a shoe- 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 213 

repairing department, and a tailoring shop. 
The cooking class is even more popular with 
the boys than with the girls. In the shoe- 
repairing shop, which holds classes after school 
hours, the boys learn to mend their own shoes. 
A professional cobbler is the teacher, and the 
mending must be neatly done. The boys begin 
work on their own old shoes and as they pro- 
gress in skill, are allowed to bring shoes from 
home to be repaired, or to mend for the girls and 
for the younger boys in the school, who, how- 
ever, pay a small sum for the work. The tailor- 
ing department is run on the same plan, to teach 
habits of personal neatness and of industry 
through giving the pupils work that results in 
neatness and gives some manual skill and con- 
trol of tools. The class is taught by a tailor, 
and the boys learn to patch and mend their own 
clothes, as well as to sponge and press them. 
Attendance is entirely voluntary, and the class 
meets after the regular school work is over. 
Knowing how to keep themselves tidy has re- 
sulted in a very marked improvement in the 
appearance and habits of the boys in the class, 
and has had an influence not only on the whole 
school, but on the neighborhood as well. The 
boys no longer resent the attempts of the 



214 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

teachers to influence them towards cleanliness 
and neatness, for they have become conscious 
of the advantages of these habits. 

The cooking and domestic science classes are 
taught in one of the tenements turned over to the 
school without having been repaired, although 
the cooking equipment was supplied by the city. 
All the other work on the building — cleaning, 
painting, repairing, furnishing, and decorating 
— was done and paid for by the pupils of the 
school with help from the neighborhood clubs 
that use the building. There is a large cooking 
room, a demonstration dining and sitting room, 
and two bedrooms. The girls not only learn 
to cook real meals, but they learn how to serve 
them, and then how to take care of the demon- 
stration house. The domestic science classes 
include lessons in buying, the comparative costs 
and values of food, something of food chem- 
istry and values, and large quantity cooking. 
This work is done in connection with the soup 
kitchen. A group of girls have charge of the 
kitchen long enough to really learn about the 
work. They plan the menu and do the buying, 
cooking and serving of the soup, selling it for 
three cents a bowl to the pupils of the school 
and to neighbors. They keep all the accounts 
and not only have to make all their expenses. 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 215 

but are expected to make some profit for tlie 
use of the school as well. They have made 
enough profit in one year to furnish most of the 
demonstration house. Aside from teaching 
how to do housework thoroughly and easily, 
the purpose of the house is to furnish an ex- 
ample of what can be done to make one of the 
regular frame tenements of the district com- 
fortable and attractive, without more expense 
than most of the people now put into their 
homes. The house is very simply furnished, 
with cheap and strong things, in plain colors 
that are easily kept clean; the painting and 
papering was done by the pupils. The sewing 
class has made all the curtains and linen for 
the house, and made furniture by covering 
boxes, etc. Besides the class work that goes 
on in the building, the rooms are also used as a 
social center for the girls of the school. 

The third building left standing on the 
ground purchased by the school authorities has 
been turned into a boys' club house. There is 
a gymnasium, two club rooms, and a shower 
bath room. This house was in exceedingly bad 
condition when it became part of the school 
property, and there was no money and not 
much lumber available to repair it. But the 
boys of the school wanted the club house, and 



216 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

were not discouraged because it was not given 
to them all finished. They started out, as they 
had done in the manual training and domestic 
science buildings, to do the work themselves. 
Under the direction of the manual training 
teacher, they pulled off old paper and broken 
plaster, tore up uneven floors and took out par- 
titions. Then they laid floors, put in wood- 
work and painted it, rehung doors, mended 
windows, and made furniture and gymnastic 
apparatus. When there was a job they could 
not do, such as the plastering and plumbing, 
they went among their friends and asked for 
money or help in work. Plumbers and plas- 
terers who lived near the school came in and 
gave their time and work to help the boys get 
their building in order, and other friends gave 
enough money to finish the work. Men in the 
neighborhood dug a long ditch through the 
school grounds for sewerage connections. 
Gradually they are adding to the gymnasium 
apparatus and to the simple bathing facilities, 
while cleaning and keeping up the painting 
continue to supply opportunities for useful 
work. 

As already indicated, the reflex effect upon 
homes in the vicinity has been marked. The 
school board had intended to wreck the three 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 217 

tenement houses when they bought the land; 
but Mr. Valentine saw the opportunity to give 
the community something which they needed, 
and at the same time to arouse a spirit of co- 
operation and interest among both parents and 
pupils in place of the old spirit of distrust and 
antagonism, when he persuaded the board to 
turn the buildings over to the school. He told 
the pupils what could be done with them and 
asked for their help in doing it. He got a 
hearty response at once, and so went out into 
the district with the children and told their 
parents what he proposed to do and asked for 
help. He got the same generous response for 
the first building, the manual training shops, 
as for the boys' club. Besides the time and 
material which the skilled workers of the com- 
munity have contributed, the community has 
given $350 in cash, no small sum for people as 
poor as they are. The value of the work being 
done in these buildings and of the training the 
boys have had in making them over, is proved 
by the fact that the community and the boys 
themselves wanted the work badly enough to 
pay for getting it in money and work. "While 
it has undoubtedly been a struggle for the 
school and the district to contribute so much, 
the benefit to the school and to the community 



218 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

has been greater just because of these sacrifices 
and struggles. The work has made over the 
relations between the school and the pupils. 
The children like to go to school now, where 
before they had to be forced to go with threats 
of the truant officer, and their behavior is bet- 
ter when they get to school. The children's 
parents have changed their attitude in the 
same way. They not only see that the children 
go to school, but they want them to go because 
they appreciate that the school is giving them 
things they need to make them self-supporting ; 
but they also see that they have their own share 
to do if the work is to be successful. The 
school has been the cause of the growth of com- 
munity spirit in increased civic and social ac- 
tivities of the district. "With improved attend- 
ance and discipline, the number of cases sent 
to the juvenile court has decreased one-half in 
proportion to the number of pupils in school. 
Meanwhile the educational value of the work 
done has undoubtedly been greater than that 
of work done in disconnected shops and 
kitchens. 

The school is also carrying on definite work 
to arouse the pupils to a sense of responsi- 
bility for their community and neighbors. 
Giving the pupils as much liberty and respon- 





(i) The boys like cooking more than the girls do. 

(2) Mending their own shoes, to learn cobbling. 

(Public School 26, Indianapolis.) 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 219 

sibility as possible around the school buildings 
is an important factor. Each pupil in the 
higher grades is given some small child in one 
of the lower grades to look out for On the 
playground they see to it that the charge has 
a fair chance to play, and that he behaves him- 
self ; they see that the little boy or girl comes 
to school clean and tidy, if necessary doing the 
washing or mending themselves. This work 
has proved especially successful in doing away 
with bullying and in arousing personal pride 
and a sense of responsibility in the older chil- 
dren; the younger ones are better looked after 
than before and have many opportunities to 
learn things from the older and more advanced 
pupils. The older pupils are also encouraged 
in every way to help in carrying on the outside 
activities of the school. They make calls and 
write notes to keep up the attendance at the 
night school; they see to the order of the prin- 
cipal's office and keep the boys' club house in 
order. All the teachers of the school are 
agreed upon a policy of frank discussion of the 
poverty of the district, and of urging the pupils 
to earn money to help their parents by becom- 
ing as nearly self-supporting as possible. 
Each grade keeps track of what its members 
earn and how they earn it, and the grade with 



220 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the largest sum to its credit feels that it has ac- 
complished something worth while during the 
year. 

There is a savings bank in the school to 
teach the children habits of thrift and economy ; 
here a pupil may deposit any sum from a penny 
up. The pupil receives a bank book in which 
stamps are pasted for his deposits, the money 
being kept in a city savings bank. The school 
also has a branch library, and the pupils are 
taught how to use it. Part of the playground 
has been made into a school garden, and here 
every pupil in the higher grades has a garden 
plot, also instruction which enables him to 
grow successfully some of the commoner fruits 
and flowers. This work is made very practi- 
cal; the children have the sort of garden that 
would be useful and ornamental if it were in 
their own back yard. The school carries on a 
neighborhood campaign for home gardens, and 
the pupils with school gardens do much of this 
work, telling the people who want gardens what 
to plant, and giving them practical help with 
their plot until it is well established. In all 
these ways the teachers are trying to make am- 
bitious, responsible citizens out of the student 
body. Inside the school pupils are taught 
higher standards of living than prevail in their 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 221 

homes, and they are taught as well trades and 
processes which will at least give them a start 
towards prosperity, and then, too, they are 
aroused to a feeling of responsibility for the wel- 
fare of the whole community. 

All these things are done as part of the reg- 
ular work of the school, and to a large extent 
during regular school hours. But there are 
many other activities which, while not contribu- 
ting so directly to the education of the children, 
are important for the general welfare of the 
whole community. There is a night school for 
the adults of the neighborhood who want to go 
on learning, the shops being used as well as the 
schoolrooms. A group of people especially in- 
terested in the school have formed a club to 
promote the interest of the night school, and to 
see that the men of the community understand 
the opportunities it offers for them to perfect 
themselves in a trade or in their knowledge and 
use of English. This club is made up of men 
who live near the school and who are sufficiently 
alive to the needs of the school and the commu- 
nity to work very hard to let all the district 
know what the school is already doing for its 
welfare and what it can do as the people come 
to demand more and more from it. Besides 
keeping up the attendance at the night school, 



222 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEKOW 

the club lias done mucli for tlie general welfare 
of the school, like helping raise money for re- 
modeling the buildings and giving an expensive 
phonograph to the school. The success of the 
school as a social center and the need for such 
a center are realized when we remember that 
this club is made up of men who live in the dis- 
trict, whose children are using the school, and 
who are perhaps themselves going to the night 
school. 

There is also a vacation school during the 
summer time for the children of the neighbor- 
hood, with some classroom work and a great 
deal of time spent on the playground and in 
the workshops. The school has an active 
alumni association which uses the school build- 
ing for social purposes and keeps track of the 
pupils that leave. A parents' club has been 
started as an aid in gaining the cooperation 
of the pupils ' parents in the work of the school 
and as a means of finding out the real needs of 
the neighborhood. The parents are brought 
in even closer contact with the school through 
the series of teas given by the grades for their 
parents during the year. Each grade serves 
tea once a year in the domestic science house 
for the mothers of its pupils. The children do 
the work for the teas as part of their domestic 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 223 

science work, and write the invitations in their 
English class. The teachers use these teas as 
an opportunity for visiting the children's 
homes and getting acquainted with their 
mothers. The teacher who knows the home 
conditions of each child is much better able to 
adjust the work to the child, being aware of his 
weak and strong points. To poverty-stricken, 
overworked mothers these social gatherings 
come as a real event. 

The pupils of the school are given social as 
well as educational opportunities through their 
school life. The boys' club house is opened 
nearly every night to local boys' clubs, some of 
them being school organizations and some in- 
dependent ones. There are rooms for the boys 
to hold meetings and to play games, and a well- 
equipped gymnasium. The teachers of the 
school take turns supervising these evening 
gatherings. The attendance is large for the 
size of the building. Giving the boys a place 
for wholesome activities has done much to break 
up the habits of street loafing and the gangs 
which were so common in the district. The 
girls of the school use the domestic science 
house for social purposes. Two chapters of 
the Camp Fire girls hold regular meetings in 
the building and get help and advice from the 



224 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

teachers. Each domestic science class aims to 
teach the girls how to live a comfortable and 
self-respecting life, as well as how to do house- 
work, and so becomes a social center of its own. 
The girls learn to cook and serve good cheap 
meals, and then they sit down together and eat 
what they have cooked. They talk over their 
individual problems with the teacher and with 
each other, and give each other much practical 
help. The domestic science teacher helps the 
girls who have some skill find work to do after 
school hours so that they can help their fam- 
ilies by helping themselves; she helps the pu- 
pils find steady work as they leave school and 
then keeps track of them, encouraging them to 
go on fitting themselves for better work. 

The success of the settlement work the school 
has done points strongly to the fact that the 
schoolhouse is the natural and logical social 
center in a neighborhood, the teachers coming 
into closer and more natural contact with both 
children and parents than is possible in the 
case of other district workers. 

There are large economies combining the 
school and the settlement in districts where 
the social and economic standards of living are 
so low that the people are not especially suc- 
cessful citizens. Both the school and settle- 



THE ^tCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 225 

ment facilities are enlarged by using the same 
group of buildings for both purposes. The set- 
tlement has the use of better and larger shops 
and classrooms than most settlements can com- 
mand, and the school uses the social rooms and 
activities to become itself a community. The 
school comes in contact with almost all the fam- 
ilies in a district so that community action is 
much easier to establish. But even more im- 
portant than these economies are the far-reach- 
ing results which come from the fact that the 
school settlement is a democratic community, 
really reflecting the conditions of the com- 
munity. 

In using the school plant for any activities, 
whether simply for the usual eight classes or 
to supply the community with all sorts of op- 
portunities, as the Gary schools are doing and 
as Mr. Valentine's school is doing, the peo- 
ple of the community feel that they are using 
for their own ends public facilities which 
have been paid for by their taxes. They want 
to see real, tangible results in the way of more 
prosperous and efiScient families and better 
civic conditions, coming from the increased plant 
in the district school. Because the schools are 
public institutions in fact as well as in name, 
people know whether the schools are really 



226 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

meeting their needs and they are willing to 
work to see that they do. The school settle- 
ment reaps all the advantages of working for 
definite ends and of having the businesslike co- 
operation of the community as a body. In 
spite of the fact that the work of Mr. Valen- 
tine's school has been hampered by lack of 
funds, and that some of the special things done 
are suited to one particular local population, 
the changes which have taken place in the 
neighborhood in the relation between the school 
and the parents, and in the spirit of the pupils in 
their school attitude, show what a public school 
may mean to its neighborhood when it ceases 
to be an isolated academic institution. 

The Gary schools and Mr. Valentine's school 
have effected an entire reorganization in order 
to meet the particular needs of the children of 
the community, physically, intellectually, and 
socially. Both schools are looking towards a 
larger social ideal ; towards a community where 
the citizens will be prosperous and indepen- 
dent, where there will be no poverty-ridden 
population unable to produce good citizens. 
While changes in social conditions must take 
place before this can happen, these schools be- 
lieve that such an education as they provide is 
one of the natural ways and perhaps the surest 



THE SCHOOL AS A SETTLEMENT 227 

way of helping along the changes. Teaching 
people from the time they are children to think 
clearly and to take care of themselves is one 
of the best safeguards against exploitation. 

A great many schools are doing some of the 
same sort of work, using the activities of the 
community as a means of enriching the cur- 
riculum, and using the school plant for a neigh- 
borhood center. The civic clubs of the Chi- 
cago public schools, which have already been 
described, are aiming at the same thing: the 
better equipment of pupils for their life in the 
community with the hope of improving the com- 
munity itself. The Cottage School at River- 
side, Hlinois, where pupils all come from well- 
to-do American families, has found a similar 
club valuable for the pupils and of real use to 
the town. The school organized by the pupils 
into a civic league has made itself responsible 
for the conditions of the streets in certain por- 
tions of the town, and is not only cleaning up 
but trying to get the rest of the town interested 
in the problem. Mock elections and '^ self- 
governments" based upon political organiza- 
tion are examples of attempts of education to 
meet the need for training in good citizenship. 
Using the school plant as a social center is 
recognition of the need for social change and 



228 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

of the community's responsibility to help effect 
it. 

The attempt to make this enlarged use of the 
school plant is not so much in order to train 
young people so that they can assume the bur- 
den of improvement for themselves as to give 
the neighborhood some immediate opportuni- 
ties which it lacks for recreation, intercourse 
and improvement. The school plant is the 
natural and convenient place for such under- 
takings. Every community has the right to ex- 
pect and demand that schools supported at pub- 
lic expense for public ends shall serve commu- 
nity uses as widely as possible. As attempts in 
socializing education have met with such success 
and such enthusiasm among the children that 
their value as educational tools is established, 
so giving the people of the community a real 
share in activities centered in school buildings 
and employing school equipment, is one of the 
surest ways of giving them a more intelligent 
public spirit and a greater interest in the right 
education of the youth of the land. 



CHAPTER IX 

INDUSTRY AND EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 

The chief effort of all educational reforms is 
to bring about a readjustment of existing scho- 
lastic institutions and methods so that they shall 
respond to changes in general social and intel- 
lectual conditions. The school, like other hu- 
man institutions, acquires inertia and tends to 
go on doing things that have once got started, 
irrespective of present demands. There are 
many topics and methods in existing education 
which date back to social conditions which are 
passing away. They are perpetuated because 
of tradition and custom. Especially is it true of 
our institutions of learning that their control- 
ling ideals and ideas were fixed when industrial 
methods differed radically from those of the 
present. They grew up when the place of in- 
dustry in life was much less important than it 
is now when practically all political and social 
affairs are bound up with economic questions. 
They were formed when there was no positive 
connection between science and the operations 

229 



230 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

of production and distribution of goods; while 
at tlie present, manufacturing, railways, elec- 
tric transportation, and all the agencies of daily 
life, represent just so much applied science. 
Economic changes have brought about a closer 
interdependence among men and strengthened 
the ideal of mutual service. These political, in- 
tellectual, and moral changes make questions 
connected with industrial education the most 
important problem of present-day public edu- 
cation in America. 

The fact that the Greek word from which our 
word ''school" is derived meant leisure sug- 
gests the nature of the change which has taken 
place. It is true at all times that education 
means relief from the pressure of having to 
make a living. The young have to be supported 
more or less by others while they are being in- 
structed. They must be saved from the impact 
of the struggle for material existence. Opposi- 
tion to child labor goes hand in hand with the 
effort to extend the facilities of public schools 
to all the wards of the nation. There must be 
free time for schooling, and pupils must not 
come to their studies physically worn out. 
Moreover, the use of imagination, thought and 
emotion in education demands minds which are 
free from harassing questions of self-support. 



EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 231 

There must be an atmosphere of leisure if there 
is to be a truly liberal or free education. 

Such things are as true now as when schools 
were named after the idea of leisure. But there 
was once assumed a permanent division between 
a leisure class and a laboring class. Education, 
beyond at least the mere rudiments, was in- 
tended only for the former. Its subject-matter 
and its methods were designed for those who 
were sufficiently well off so that they did not 
have to work for a living. The stigma attached 
to working with the hands was especially strong. 
In aristocratic and feudal countries such work 
was done by slaves or serfs, and the sense of 
social inferiority attached to these classes nat- 
urally led to contempt for the pursuits in which 
they were engaged. Training for them was a 
servile sort of education, while liberal edu- 
cation was an education for a free man, 
and a free man was a member of the upper 
classes, one who did not have to engage 
in labor for his own support or that of 
others. The antagonism to industry which was 
generated extended itself to all activities re- 
quiring use of the hands. A ''gentleman" 
would not use his hands or train them to skill, 
save for sport or war. To employ the hands 
was to do useful work for others, while to render 



232 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

personal service to others was a badge of a 
dependent social and political status. 

Strange as it may seem, the very notions of 
knowledge and of mind were influenced by this 
aristocratic order of society. The less the body 
in general, and the hands and the senses in par- 
ticular, were employed, the higher the grade of 
intellectual activity. True thought resulting in 
true knowledge was to be carried on wholly 
within the mind without the body taking any 
part at all. Hence studies which could be car- 
ried on with a minimum of physical action were 
alone the studies belonging to a liberal educa- 
tion. First in order came such things as phi- 
losophy, theology, mathematics, logic, etc., which 
were purely mental. Next in rank came litera- 
ture and language, with grammar, rhetoric, etc. 
The pursuit of even what we call the fine arts 
was relegated to a lower grade, because success 
in painting, sculpture, architecture, etc., re- 
quired technical and manual training. Music 
alone was exempt from condemnation, partly 
because vocal music did not require the training 
of the hands, and partly because music was used 
for devotional purposes. Otherwise education i 
should train men to appreciate art, not to pro- 
duce it. 

These ideas and ideals persisted in educa- 



EDUCATIONAL EEADJUSTMENT 233 

tional theory and practice long after the political 
and industrial conditions which generated them 
had begun to give way. Practically all the con- 
ceptions associated with culture and cultural edu- 
cation were created when the immense superior- 
ity of a leisure class over all working classes was 
a matter of course. Refinement, polish, esthetic 
taste, knowledge of classic literatures, acquaint- 
ance with foreign languages and with branches 
of sciences which could be studied by purely 
'* mental" means, and which were not put to 
practical uses, were the marks of culture, just as 
they were the marks of leisure time and supe- 
rior wealth. The learned professions — divinity, 
law, and, to a less extent, medicine— were ad- 
mitted upon suffrance to the sphere of higher 
education, for the manual element in the service 
rendered to others was not so great as in in- 
dustrial pursuits. But professional education 
was looked upon with disparagement in contrast 
with a liberal education just because its aim was 
rendering service to others. And for a long 
time medicine in particular occupied a mediocre 
and dubious position just because it required 
personal attention to the bodily needs of others. 
Opposition to the introduction into higher 
education of the natural sciences was due not 
only to the conservative dread of change on 



234 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the part of establislied institutions, but also to 
the fact that these sciences emphasized the use 
of the senses (which are physical organs), of 
physical apparatus, and of manual skill re- 
quired in its manipulation. Even the repre- 
sentatives of mathematical science joined those 
of literary studies in assuming that the natural 
sciences must be less cultural than sciences like 
geometry, algebra, and calculus, which could 
be pursued in a more purely mental way. Even 
when the progress of social changes forced more 
and more useful studies into the curriculum, the 
idea of a graded rank in the cultural value of 
studies persisted. Occupations like banking 
and commerce involved less manual activity and 
less direct personal service to others than house- 
keeping, manufacturing, and farming, conse- 
quently the studies which prepared for them 
were at least more '^ genteel" than studies hav- 
ing to do with the latter. Even at the present 
time many people associate mental activity with 
physical acquiescence. 

The first breach in this order of ideas oc- 
curred in elementary education. Along with 
the spread of democratic ideas which took place 
in the eighteenth century, there developed the 
idea that education was a need and right of the 
masses as well as a privilege of the upper 



EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 235 

classes. In reading Rousseau and Pestalozzi, 
an American student, who is used to the demo- 
cratic idea of universal education, is not likely 
to notice that their conception of the educational 
development of all as a social necessity is even 
more revolutionary than the particular methods 
which they urged. But such was the case. 
Even so enlightened a liberal as John Locke 
wrote his educational essay with reference to 
the education of a gentleman, and assumed that 
the training of the laboring classes should be of 
a radically different kind. The idea that all the 
powers of all members of society are capable of 
development and that society owed it to itself 
and to its constituent members to see that the 
latter received this development, was the first 
great intellectual token of the democratic revo- 
lution which was occurring. It is noteworthy 
that Rousseau was Swiss by birth, that demo- 
cratic political ideas were rife in France when 
he wrote, and that Pestalozzi was not only Swiss 
by birth but did his work in that republican 
country. 

While the development of public elementary 
schools for the masses inevitably puts emphasis 
upon the usefulness of studies as a reason for 
education, the growth of the public curriculum 
and methods was profoundly affected by the sur- 



236 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

viving ideals of leisure class education. Ele- 
mentary education, just because it was an edu- 
cation for the masses, was regarded as a kind 
of necessary political and economic concession 
rather than as a serious educative enterprise. A 
strict line was drawn between it, with its useful 
studies, and the higher education of the few con- 
ducted for genuinely cultural purposes. Eead- 
ing, writing, arithmetic, the three R's, were to 
be taught because of their utility. They were 
needed to make individuals capable of self- 
support, of ''getting on" better, and so capable 
of rendering better economic service under 
changed commercial conditions. It was as- 
sumed that the greater number of pupils would 
leave school as soon as they had mastered the 
practical use of these tools. 

No better evidence could be found that pri- 
mary education is still regarded with respect 
to the larger number of pupils, as a practical 
social necessity, not as an intrinsic educative 
measure, than the fact that the greater num- 
ber of pupils leave school about the fifth grade 
— ^that is, when they have acquired rudimentary 
skill in reading, writing and figuring. The op- 
position of influential members of the commu- 
nity to the introduction of any studies, save 
perhaps geography and history, beyond the 



EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 237 

three R's, the tendency to regard other things 
as ** frills and fads," is evidence of the way 
in which purely elementary schooling is re- 
garded. A fuller and wider culture in litera- 
ture, science and the arts may be allowed 
in the case of those better off, but the 
masses are not to be educatively developed 
so much as trained in the use of tools 
needed to make them effective workers. Ele- 
mentary instruction to a larger extent than we 
usually admit, is a substitute, under the changed 
circumstances of production and distribution of 
goods, for the older apprenticeship system. 
The latter was never treated as educational in 
a fundamental sense; the former is only par- 
tially conducted as a thoroughly educational 
enterprise. 

In part the older ideals of a predominantly 
literary and ''intellectual" education invaded 
and captured the new elementary schools. For 
the smaller number of pupils who might go on 
to a higher and cultural education, the three 
R's were the tools of learning, the only really 
indispensable tools of acquiring knowledge. 
They are all of them concerned with language, 
that is, with symbols of facts and ideas, a 
fact which throws a flood of light upon the 
prevailing ideas of learning and knowledge. 



238 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

Knowledge consists of the ready-made material 
wMch others have found out, and mastery of 
language is the means of access to this fund. 
To learn is to appropriate something from this 
ready-made store, not to find out something for 
one's self. Educational reformers may go on 
attacking pouring-in methods of teaching and 
passive reception methods of learning; but as 
long as these ideas of the nature of knowledge 
are current, they make little headway. The 
separation of the activity of the mind from the 
activity of the senses in direct observation and 
from the activity of the hand in construction 
and manipulation, makes the material of studies 
academic and remote, and compels the passive 
acquisition of information imparted by text- 
book and teacher. 

In the United States there was for a long 
time a natural division of labor between the 
book-learning of the schools and the more direct 
and vital learning of out-of-school life. It is 
impossible to exaggerate the amount of mental 
and moral training secured by our forefathers 
in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. 
They were engaged in subduing a new country. 
Industry was at a premium, and instead of being 
of a routine nature, pioneer conditions required 
initiative, ingenuity, and pluck. For the most 



EDUCATIONAL KEADJUSTMENT 239 

part men were working for themselves; or, if 
for others, with a prospect of soon becoming 
masters of their own affairs. While the citi- 
zens of old-world monarchies had no responsi- 
bility for the conduct of government, our fore- 
fathers were engaged in the experiment of con- 
ducting their own government. They had the 
incentive of a participation in the conduct of 
civic and public affairs which came directly 
home to them. Production had not yet been 
concentrated in factories in congested centers, 
but was distributed through villages. Markets 
were local rather than remote. Manufacturing 
was still literally hand-making, with the use of 
local water-power ; it was not carried on by big 
machines to which the employed ''hands" were 
mechanical adjuncts. The occupations of daily 
life engaged the imagination and enforced 
knowledge of natural materials and processes. 

Children as they grew up either engaged in or 
were in intimate contact with spinning, weaving, 
bleaching, dyeing, and the making of clothes; 
with lumbering, and leather, saw-mills, and car- 
pentry; with working of metals and making of 
candles. They not only saw the grain planted 
and reaped, but were familiar with the village 
grist-mill and the preparation of flour and of 
foodstuffs for cattle. These things were close 



240 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

to them, the processes were all open to inspec- 
tion. They knew where things came from and 
how they were made or where they went to, and 
they knew these things by personal observation. 
They had the discipline that came from sharing 
in useful activities. 

While there was too much taxing toil, there 
was also stimulus to imagination and training 
of independent judgment along with the personal 
knowledge of materials and processes. Under 
such conditions, the schools could hardly have 
done better than devote themselves to books, 
and to teaching a command of the use of books, 
especially since, in most communities, books, 
while a rarity and a luxury, were the sole means 
of access to the great world beyond the village 
surroundings. 

But conditions changed and school materials 
and methods did not change to keep pace. Pop- 
ulation shifted to urban centers. Production 
became a mass affair, carried on in big factories, 
instead of a household affair. Growth of steam 
and electric transportation brought about pro- 
duction for distant markets, even for a world 
market. Industry was no longer a local or 
neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was 
split up into a very great variety of separate 
processes through the economies incident upon 



EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 241 

extreme division of labor. Even the working- 
men in a particular line of industry rarely have 
any chance to become acquainted with the en- 
tire course of production, while outsiders see 
practically nothing but either the raw material 
on one hand or the finished product on the other. 
Machines depend in their action upon compli- 
cated facts and principles of nature which are 
not recognized by the worker unless he has had 
special intellectual training. The machine 
worker, unlike the older hand worker, is fol- 
lowing blindly the intelligence of others instead 
of his own knowledge of materials, tools, and 
processes. With the passing of pioneer condi- 
tions passed also the days when almost every 
individual looked forward to being at some time 
in control of a business of his own. Great 
masses of men have no other expectation than 
to be permanently hired for pay to work for 
others. Inequalities of wealth have multiplied, 
so that demand for the labor of children has be- 
come a pressing menace to the serious education 
of great numbers. On the other hand, children 
in wealthy families have lost the moral and 
practical discipline that once came from sharing 
in the round of home duties. For a large num- 
ber there is little alternative, especially in 
larger cities, between irksome child labor and 



242 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

demoralizing child idleness. Inquiries con- 
ducted by competent authorities show that in 
the great centers of population opportunities 
for play are so inadequate that free time is not 
even spent in wholesome recreations by a ma- 
jority of children. 

These statements do not begin, of course, to 
cover the contrasts between present social con- 
ditions and those to which our earlier school 
facilities were adapted. They suggest, how- 
ever, some of the obvious changes with which 
education must reckon if it is to maintain a vital 
connection with contemporary social life, so as 
to give the kind of instruction needed to make 
efficient and self-respecting members of the com- 
munity. The sketch would be even more incom- 
plete, however, if it failed to note that along 
with these changes there has been an immense 
cheapening of printed material and an immense 
increase in the facilities for its distribution. 
Libraries abound, books are many and cheap, 
magazines and newspapers are everywhere. 
Consequently the schools do not any longer bear 
the peculiar relation to books and book knowl- 
edge which they once did. While out of school 
conditions have lost many of the educative 
features they once possessed, they have gained 
immensely in the provision they make for read- 



EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 243 

ing matter and for stimulating interest in read- 
ing. It is no longer necessary or desirable that 
the schools should devote themselves so exclu- 
sively to this phase of instruction. But it is 
more necessary than it used to be that the 
schools shall develop such interest in the pupils 
as will induce them to read material that is in- 
tellectually worth while. 

While merely learning the use of language 
symbols and of acquiring habits of reading is 
less important than it used to be, the question of 
the use to which the power and habits shall be 
put is much more important. To learn to use 
reading matter means that schools shall arouse 
in pupils problems and interests that lead stu- 
dents both in school and after they leave school 
to seek that subject-matter of history, science, 
biography, and literature which is inherently 
valuable, and not to waste themselves upon the 
trash which is so abundantly provided. It is 
absolutely impossible to secure this result when 
schools devote themselves to the formal sides of 
language instead of to developing deep and vital 
interest in subject-matter. Educational the- 
orists and school authorities who attempt to 
remedy the deplorable reading habits with which 
many youth leave school by means of a greater 
amount of direct attention to language studies 



244 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOYv 

and literatures, are engaged in i "'o 
task. Enlargement of intellectual ...zon, 
and awakening to the multitude of interesting 
problems presented by contemporary conditions, 
are the surest guarantees for good use of time 
with books and magazines. When books are 
made an end in themselves, only a small and 
highly specialized class will devote themselves 
to really serviceable books. When there is a 
lively sense of the interest of social affairs, all 
who possess the sense will turn as naturally to 
the books which foster that interest as to the 
other things of which they feel a need. 

These are some of the reasons for saying that 
the general problem of readjustment of educa- 
tion to meet present conditions is most acute at 
the angle of industry. The various details may 
be summed up in three general moral principles. 
First, never before was it as important as it is 
now that each individual should be capable 
of self-respecting, self-supporting, intelligent 
work — that each should make a living for him- 
self and those dependent upon his efforts, and 
should make it with an intelligent recognition 
of what he is doing and an intelligent interest 
in doing his work well. Secondly, never before 
did the work of one individual affect the welfare 
of others on such a wide scale as at present. 



ED^. National readjustment 245 

Moder ^ conditions of production and exchange 
of coni lodities have made the whole world one 
to a degree never approximated before. A war 
to-day may close banks and paralyze trade in 
places thousands of miles away from the scene 
of action. This is only a coarse and sensational 
manifestation of an interdependence which is 
quietly and persistently operating in the activity 
of every farmer, manufacturer, laborer, and 
merchant, in every part of the civilized globe. 
Consequently there is a demand which never 
existed before that all the items of school in- 
struction shall be seen and appreciated in their 
bearing upon the network of social activities 
which bind people together. When men lived in 
small groups which had little to do with each 
other, the harm done by an education which 
pursued exclusively intellectual and theoretic 
aims was comparatively slight. Knowledge 
might be isolated because men were isolated. 
But to-day the accumulation of information, 
just as information, apart from its social bear- 
ings, is worse than futile. Acquisition of modes 
of skill apart from realization of the social uses 
to which they may be put is fairly criminal. In 
the third place, industrial methods and proc- 
esses depend to-day upon knowledge of facts 
and laws of natural and social science in a much 



246 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

greater degree than ever before. Our railways 
and steamboats, traction ears, telegraphs, and 
telephones, factories and farms, even our ordi- 
nary household appliances, depend for their 
existence upon intricate mathematical, physical, 
chemical, and biological insight. They depend 
for their best ultimate use upon an understand- 
ing of the facts and relationships of social life. 
Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs 
and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they 
must have some understanding of the physical 
and social facts behind and ahead of the ma- 
terial and appliances with which they are deal- 
ing. 

Thus put, the problem may seem to be so 
vast and complicated as to be impossible of 
solution. But we must remember that we are 
dealing with a problem of readjustment, not of 
original creation. It will take a long time to 
complete the readjustment which will be brought 
about gradually. The main thing now is to get 
started, and to start in the right direction. 
Hence the great importance of the various ex- 
perimental steps which have already been taken. 
And we must also remember that the essential 
thing to be brought about through the change 
is not amassing more information, but the for- 
mation of certain attitudes and interests, ways 



EDUCATIONAL KEADJUSTMENT 247 

of looking at things and dealing with them. 
If accomplishment of the educational readjust- 
ment meant that pupils must become aware of 
the whole scope of scientific and social material 
involved in the occupations of daily life, the 
problem would be absolutely impossible of solu- 
tion. But in reality accomplishing the reform 
means less attention than under present condi- 
tions to mere bulk of knowledge. 

What is wanted is that pupils shall form the 
habit of connecting the limited information they 
acquire with the activities of life, and gain abil- 
ity to connect a limited sphere of human activity 
with the scientific principles upon which its suc- 
cessful conduct depends. The attitudes and in- 
terests thus formed will then take care of them- 
selves. If we take arithmetic or geography 
themselves as subjects isolated from social ac- 
tivities and uses, then the aim of instruction 
must be to cover the whole ground. Any failure 
to do so will mark a defect in learning. But not 
so if what we, as educators, are concerned with 
is that pupils shall realize the connection of 
what they learn about number, or about the 
earth 's surface, with vital social activities. The 
question ceases to be a matter simply of quan- 
tity and becomes one of motive and purpose. 
The problem is not the impossible one of ac- 



248 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

quainting the pupil with all the social uses to 
which knowledge of number is put, but of teach- 
ing him in such a way that each step which he 
takes in advance in his knowledge of number 
shall be connected with some situation of human 
need and activity, so that he shall see the bear- 
ing and application of what is learnt. Any child 
who enters upon the study of number already 
has experiences which involve number. Let his 
instruction in arithmetic link itself to these 
everyday social activities in which he already 
shares, and, as far as it goes, the problem of 
socializing instruction is solved. 

The industrial phase of the situation comes 
in, of course, in the fact that these social experi- 
ences have their industrial aspect. This does 
not mean that his number work shall be crassly 
utilitarian, or that all the problems shall be in 
terms of money and pecuniary gain or loss. On 
the contrary, it means that the pecuniary side 
shall be relegated to its proportionate place, and 
emphasis put upon the place occupied by knowl- 
edge of weight, form, size, measure, numerical 
quantity, as well as money, in the carrying on of 
the activities of life. The purpose of the read- 
justment of education to existing social condi- 
tions is not to substitute the acquiring of money 
or of bread and butter for the acquiring of in- 



EDUCATIONAL READJUSTMENT 249 

formation as an educational aim. It is to sup- 
ply men and women who as they go forth from 
school shall be intelligent in the pursuit of the 
activities in which they engage. That a part of 
that intelligence will, however, have to do with 
the place which bread and butter actually occupy 
in the lives of people to-day, is a necessity. 
Those who fail to recognize this fact are still 
imbued, consciously or unconsciously, with the 
intellectual prejudices of an aristocratic state. 
But the primary and fundamental problem is 
not to prepare individuals to work at partic- 
ular callings, but to be vitally and sincerely 
interested in the calling upon which they must 
enter if they are not to be social parasites, and 
to be informed as to the social and scientific 
bearings of that calling. The aim is not to pre- 
pare bread-winners. But since men and women 
are normally engaged in bread-winning voca- 
tions, they need to be intelligent in the conduct 
of households, the care of children, the manage- 
ment of farms and shops, and in the political 
conduct of a democracy where industry is the 
prime factor. 

The problem of educational readjustment thus 
has to steer between the extremes of an inher- 
ited bookish education and a narrow, so-called 
practical, education. It is comparatively easy 



250 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

to clamor for a retention of traditional ma- 
terials and methods on the ground that they 
alone are liberal and cultural. It is compara- 
tively easy to urge the addition of narrow vo- 
cational training for those who, so it is as- 
sumed, are to be the drawers of water and 
the hewers of wood in the existing economic 
regime, leaving intact the present bookish type 
of education for those fortunate enough not to 
have to engage in manual labor in the home, 
shop, or farm. But since the real question is 
one of reorganization of all education to meet 
the changed conditions of life — scientific, social, 
political — accompanying the revolution in in- 
dustry, the experiments which have been made 
with this wider end in view are especially de- 
serving of sympathetic recognition and intelli- 
gent examination. 



CHAPTER X 

EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 

The experiments of some of our cities in giv- 
ing their children training which shall make 
them intelligent in all the activities of their life, 
including the important one of earning a living, 
furnish excellent examples of the best that is 
being done in industrial education. The cities 
chosen for description are Gary, Chicago, and 
Cincinnati. This book is not concerned with 
schools or courses which are designed simply 
to give the pupils control of one specialized field 
of knowledge; that is, which train people for 
the processes of one particular industry or pro- 
fession. It is true that most of the experiments 
in industrial education tried so far in this coun- 
try have taken the material offered by the 
largest skilled industries of the neighborhood 
for their basis, , and as a result have trained 
pupils for one or more definite trades. But 
wherever the experiment has been prompted by 
a sincere interest in education and in the wel- 
fare of the community this has not been the 

251 



252 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

object of the work. The interest of the teachers 
is not centered on the welfare of any one in- 
dustry, but on the welfare of the young people 
of the community. If the material prosperity 
of a community is due almost entirely to one or 
two industries, obviously the welfare of the in- 
dividuals of the community is very closely con- 
nected with those industries. Then the educa- 
tional purpose of training the children to the 
most intelligent use of their own capabilities 
and of their environment, is most easily served 
by using these industries as the material for the 
strictly utilitarian part of this training. The 
problem of general public-school education is 
not to train workers for a trade, but to make 
use of the whole environment of the child in 
order to supply motive and meaning to the work. 
In Gary this has been done more completely 
than in any other single place. Superintendent 
Wirt believes firmly in the value of muscular 
and sense training for children ; and instead of 
arranging artificial exercises for the purpose, he 
gives children the same sort of things to do 
that occupy their parents and call for muscular 
skill and fine coordination in the business of 
everyday life. Every child in Gary, boy and 
girl, has before his eyes in school finely equipped 
workshops, where he may, as soon as he is old 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 253 

enough, do his share of the actual work of run- 
ning and keeping in order the school buildings. 
All of the schools except one small one where 
there are no high school pupils, have a lunch 
room where the girls learn to cook, and a sew- 
ing room where they learn to make their own 
clothes; a printing shop, and carpenter, elec- 
trical, machine, pattern, forging, and molding 
shops, where boys, and girls if they wish, can 
learn how most of the things that they see about 
them every day are made. There are painting 
departments, and a metal working room, and 
also bookkeeping and stenography classes. The 
science laboratories help give the child some 
understanding of the principles and processes 
at work in the world in which he lives. 

The money and space required to equip and 
run these shops are saved from an ordinary 
sized school budget by the 'Hwo school sys- 
tem" that has been described above, and by 
the fact that all the expense usually charged 
by a school to repairs and paid out to con- 
tractors, is spent on these shops and for the 
salaries of the skilled workmen who teach in 
them. The buildings are kept in better re- 
pair than where all the work is done during 
the summer vacation, because as soon as any- 
thing needs to be fixed the pupils who are 



254 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORBOW 

working in the shop that does that kind of work 
get at the repairs under the direction of the 
teacher. These shops can not be considered in 
any way an unnecessary luxury because they 
are used also by the high school pupils who are 
specializing for one kind of work and by the 
night and summer school for their vocational 
classes. The school management says in re- 
gard to the success of this plan, ''When you 
have provided a plant where the children may 
live a complete life eight hours a day in work, 
study, and play, it is the simplest thing imagin- 
able to permit the children in the workshops, 
under the direction and with the help of well- 
trained men and women, to assume the responsi- 
bility for the equipment and maintenance of 
the school plant. An industrial and commercial 
school for every child is thus provided without 
extra cost to the taxpayers. ' ' 

The first three grades spend one hour a day 
in manual training and drawing, which take the 
form of simple hand-work and are not done in 
the shops, but in an especially equipped room 
with a trained teacher. The pupils draw, do 
painting and clay modeling, sewing and simple 
carpentry work. The five higher grades spend 
twice as much time on manual training and 
drawing. The little children go into the shops 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 255 

as helpers and watchers, much as they go into 
the science laboratories, and they pick up almost 
as much theory and understanding of processes 
as the older children possess. The art work and 
simpler forms of hand-work are kept up for the 
definite training in control and technique that 
comes from carrying through a problem inde- 
pendently. Because the small child's love of 
creating is very great, they continue until the 
pupils are old enough to choose what shop they 
will go into as apprentices to the teacher. Since 
sixth grade children are old enough and strong 
enough to begin doing the actual work of repair- 
ing and maintaining the building, in this grade 
they cease to be watchers and helpers and be- 
come real workers. Distributing school sup- 
plies, keeping the school records and taking care 
of the grounds are done by the pupils under the 
direction of the school office or the botanical 
laboratory, and constitute a course in shop-work 
just as much as does painting or repairing the 
electric lights. The school heat and power plant 
is also a laboratory for the pupils, in which they 
learn the principles of heating and lighting in 
a thoroughly practical way because they do 
much of the work connected with keeping the 
plant running. 

The shop and science courses of the schools 



256 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

last only a third of the year, and there is a 
shorter probation course of five weeks. The 
pupils choose with the advice of their teachers 
what shop course they will take ; if at the end of 
five weeks they do not like it they may change. 
They must change twice during the year. In 
this way the work can not lose its educational 
character and become simply a method of mak- 
ing juvenile factory hands to do the school re- 
pairs. Taking three shop courses in one school 
year results in giving the pupil merely a super- 
ficial knowledge of the theory and processes of 
any one kind of work. But this is as it should 
be, for the pupils are not taking the courses to 
become carpenters, or electricians, or dress- 
makers, but to find out how the work of the 
world is done. Moving as they do from one 
thing to another they learn as much of the theory 
of the industry as children of their age can 
understand, while an all-around muscular and 
sense training is insured. To confine the grow- 
ing child too long to the same kind of mus- 
cular activity is harmful both mentally and 
physically; to keep on growing he must have 
work which exercises his whole body, which 
presents new problems, keeps teaching him new 
things, and thus develops his powers of reason- 
ing and judgment. Any manual labor ceases to 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 257 

be educative the moment it becomes thoroughly 
familiar and automatic. 

In Gary, the child of the newly arrived immi- 
grant from the agricultural districts of eastern 
Europe has as much chance to prepare for a 
vocation, that is really to learn his own capa- 
bilities for the environment in which he finds 
himself, as the child of the educated American. 
From the time he enters the public school sys- 
tem, whether day nursery, kindergarten, or first 
grade, he is among people who are interested in 
making him see things as they are, and in teach- 
ing him how to do things. In the nursery he 
has toys to play with which teach him to control 
his body ; and he learns unconsciously, by being 
well taken care of, some of the principles of 
hygiene and right living. In the kindergarten 
the work to train his growing body to perform 
useful and accurate motions and coordination 
goes on. In the first three grades, emphasis is 
put on teaching him to read and write and ob- 
tain a good foundation for the theoretical knowl- 
edge which comes from books. His physical 
growth is taken care of on the playground, 
where he spends about two hours a day, doing 
things that develop his whole body in a natural 
way and playing games that give him oppor- 
tunity to satisfy his desire to play. At the same 



258 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

time lie is taking the first steps in a training 
which is more specifically vocational, in that it 
deals with the practical bread and butter side 
of life. He learns to handle the materials which 
lie at the foundations of civilization in much 
the same way that primitive people used them, 
because this way is suited to the degree of skill 
and understanding he has reached. On a little 
hand loom he weaves a piece of coarse cloth; 
with clay he makes dishes or other objects that 
are familiar to him; with reeds or raffia he 
makes baskets; and with pencil or paints he 
draws for the pleasure of making something 
beautiful; with needle and thread he makes 
himself a bag or apron. All these activities 
teach him the first steps in the manufacture of 
the things which are necessary to our life as we 
live it. The weaving and sewing show him how 
our clothing is made; the artistic turn that is 
given to all this work, through modeling and 
drawing, teach him that even the simplest things 
in life can be made beautiful, besides furnishing 
a necessary method of self-expression. 

In the fourth grade the pupils stop the mak- 
ing of isolated things, the value of which lies 
entirely in the process of making, and where 
the thing's value lies solely in its interest to the 
child. They still have time, however, to train 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 259 

whatever artistic ability they may possess, and 
to develop through their music and art the es- 
thetic side of their nature. But the rest of their 
hand-work takes a further vocational turn. 
The time for manual occupation is now all spent 
on intensive and useful work in some one kind 
of work or industry. These pupils are now less 
interested in games, so they spend less time 
playing and more time making things. The 
girl goes into the dressmaking department and 
learns to sew from the point of view of the 
worker who has to produce her own things. She 
is still too young to carry through a long, hard 
piece of work, so she goes for the first two years 
as a watcher and helper, listening to the lessons 
in theory that the seventh, eighth, or ninth grade 
pupils are taking, and helping them with their 
work. A girl may choose dressmaking for her 
first course, but at the end of three months she 
must change to some other department, perhaps 
helping cook the lunch for the school and learn- 
ing about wholesome foods and food chemistry 
for the next three months. Or if she is fond of 
drawing, she may devote nearly all her time for 
shop work to developing her talent for that. 

In the same way the boy chooses what shop he 
will go into for three months. In the carpenter 
shop he will be old enough really to make for 



260 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

himself some of the simpler things needed in 
the school building. If he choose the forging 
or casting shop he will have a chance to help 
at shoeing the horses for the use of the depart- 
ment of education, or to help an older boy make 
the mold for the iron stand to a school desk. 
In such ways he finds out something about the 
way iron is used for so many of our commonest 
things. In the fifth and sixth grades nearly all 
the boys try to get at least one course in store 
keeping. Here they go into the school store- 
rooms with the janitor; and with the school lists 
at hand unpack and check up the material which 
comes in both from the workshops and from out- 
side. Then as these things are needed through 
the building they take the requisitions from the 
office, distribute thematerial, and make the proper 
entries on the books. They are taught practical 
book-keeping and are responsible for the smooth 
running of the supply department while they 
are working there. As they learn the cost of 
all the material as well as the method of caring 
for it and distributing it, they get a good idea 
of the way a city spends its taxes and of the 
general business methods in use in stores. Both 
boys and girls may take a beginners' course in 
bookkeeping and office management. Here they 
go into what is called the school bank, and keep 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 261 

the records of the shop work of all the pupils in 
the school. 

Before pupils can graduate from school they 
must have completed a certain number of hours 
of satisfactory work in the school shops. In 
order to fit the needs of every individual pupil, 
the amount of credit does not depend upon the 
mere attendance through a three months' 
course, but each pupil is given credit by the shop 
teacher for so many hours of work for the piece 
of work he has done. The rate of work is 
standardized, and thus a more equal training is 
insured for all, for the slow worker will get 
credit for only so much completed work regard- 
less of the time it has taken him, and the fast 
worker will get credit for all he does even if he 
outstrips the average. A fixed number of 
** standard hours" of work entitle the pupil to 
"one credit," for which the pupil receives a 
credit certificate. When he has eight of these 
he has completed the work required by the voca- 
tional section of the Gary schools for gradua- 
tion. All the work connected with keeping the 
records for these credit certificates is done by 
pupils under the direction of an advanced pupil. 

From the seventh grade the pupils are the 
responsible workers in all the shops. A pupil 
who knows that he has to leave school when he 



262 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

lias finished the eighth grade can now begin to 
specialize in the workrooms of some one de- 
partment. If he wishes to become a printer he 
can work on the school presses for an entire 
year, or he can put in all his shop time in the 
bookkeeping department if he is attracted by 
office work. The girls begin to take charge of 
the lunch room, doing all the marketing and 
planning for the menus and keeping the books. 
Sewing work takes in more and more of the 
complications of the industry. The girls learn 
pattern drawing and designing, and may take 
a millinery course. The work for the students 
in office work is now extended to include stenog- 
raphy and typewriting and business methods. 
The art work also broadens to take in design- 
ing and hand metal work. There is no break 
between the work of the grades and the high 
school in the vocational department, except that 
as the pupil grows older he naturally tends to 
specialize toward what is to be his life work. 
The vocational department is on exactly the 
same level as the academic, and the school takes 
the wholesome attitude that the boy who intends 
to be a carpenter or painter needs to stay in 
school just as many years as the boy who is 
going to college. The result is the very high 
per cent, of pupils who go on to higher schools. 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 263 

The ordinary view among children of laboring 
people in large cities is tiiat only those who 
are going to be teachers need to continue at 
school after the age of fourteen; it does not 
make any difference that one is leaving to go 
into a factory or shop. But since the first day 
the Gary child began going to school he has seen 
boys and girls in their last year of high school 
still learning how to do the work that is being 
done where, perhaps, he expects ultimately to 
go to work. He knows that these pupils all 
have a tremendous advantage over him in the 
shop, that they will earn more, get a higher 
grade of work to do, and do it better. Through 
the theory lessons in the school shop he has a 
general idea of the scope and possibilities in his 
chosen trade, and what is more to the purpose, 
he knows how much more he has to learn about 
the work. He is familiar with the statistics of 
workers in that trade, knows the wages for the 
different degrees of skill and how far additional 
training can take a man. With all this informa- 
tion about, and outlook upon, his vocation it is 
not strange that so few, comparatively, of the 
pupils leave school, or that so many of those 
who have to leave come back for evening or 
Sunday classes. 

The pupil who stays in a Gary school through 



264 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the four years of high school knows the purpose 
of the work he is doing, whether he is going 
to college or not. If he wants to go into ofi&ce 
work, he shapes his course to that end, even 
before he gets his granunar grades diploma 
perhaps. But he is not taking any short cut 
to mere earning capacity in the first steps of 
office work. He is doing all the work necessary 
to give him the widest possible outlook. His 
studies include, of course, lessons in typewriting 
and stenography, bookkeeping and accounting, 
filing, etc.; but they include as well sufficient 
practice in English, grammar, and spelling so 
that he will be able to do his work well. They 
include work in history, geography and science, 
so that he will find his work interesting, and 
will have a background of general knowledge 
which will enrich his whole life. The student 
preparing for college does the work necessary 
for his entrance examinations, and a great deal 
of manual work besides, which most high school 
pupils are not supposed to have time for. It is 
just as valuable for the man who works with his 
brain to know how to do some of the things that 
the factory worker is doing, as it is for the latter 
to know how the patterns for the machine he 
is making were drawn, and. the principles th^t 
govern the power supply in the factory. In 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 265 

Gary the work is vocational in all of these 
senses. Before the pupil leaves school he has 
an opportunity to learn the specific processes 
for any one of a larger number of professions. 
But from the first day he went to school he has 
been doing work that teaches the motives and 
princii3les of the uses to which the material 
world is put by his social environment, so that 
whatever work he goes into will really be a voca- 
tion, a calling in life, and not a mere routine 
engaged in only for the sake of pay. 

The value of the pupils' training is greatly 
increased by the fact that all the work done 
is productive. All the shops are manufacturing 
plants for the Gary school ; the business school 
finds a laboratory in the school office. In dress- 
making or cooking the girls are making clothes 
which they need, or else cooking their own and 
other people's lunches. The science labora- 
tories use the work of the shops for the illustra- 
tion of their theories. The chemistry is the 
chemistry of food; botany and zoology include 
the care of the school grounds and animals. 
Drawing includes dress designing and house 
decoration, or pattern drawing for the hand 
metal shop. Arithmetic classes do the prob- 
lems for their carpentry class, and English 
classes put emphasis on the things which the 



266 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

pupils say they need to know to work in the 
printing shop: usually paragraphing, spelling, 
and punctuation. The result of this coopera- 
tion is to make the book work better than if 
they put in all their time on books. The prac- 
tical world is the real world to most people; 
but the world of ideas becomes intensely inter- 
esting when its connection with the world of 
action is clear. Because the work is real work 
constant opportunities are furnished to carry 
out the school policy of meeting the needs of the 
individual pupil. The classification according 
to fast, slow, and average workers, both in the 
vocational and academic departments, has 
already been described. It enables the pupil to 
do his work when he is ready for it, without 
being pushed ahead or held back by his fellow 
pupils ; the slow worker may learn as much as 
the rapid worker, and the latter in turn does 
not develop shiftless habits because he has not 
enough to do. But if for any reason a pupil 
does not fit into any of the usual programs of 
classification, he is not forced to the conclusion 
that the school holds no place for him. The 
pupil who is physically unfit to sit at a desk and 
study goes to school, and spends all his time 
outdoors, with a teacher to help him get strong. 
In the same way the two-school system en- 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 267 

ables the child who is weak in arithmetic to 
catch up without losing his standing in other 
subjects. He simply takes the arithmetic les- 
sons with two grades. In the shops the poor 
pupil simply works longer on one thing, but as 
his progress is not bound up with that of the 
class it makes no difference. The pupil who 
thinks he hates school, or is too stupid to keep on 
going, is not dealt with by threats and punish- 
ments. His teachers take it for granted that 
there is something wrong with his program, and 
with his help fix it for him. 

The child who hastens to leave school without 
any reason as soon as he may, is told that he 
may come back and spend all his time on the 
thing that he likes. This often results in win- 
ning back a pupil, for after he has worked for 
a few months in his favorite shop or the art 
room, he finds he needs more book knowledge 
to keep on there and so he asks to go back to 
his grade. The large number of foreign pupils 
is also more efficiently dealt with. The new- 
comer concentrates on English and reading and 
writing until he is able to go into the grade 
where his age would naturally place him, and 
the pupil who expects to go to school only a very 
short time before going to work can be put into 
the classes which will give him what he needs 



268 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

most, regardless of his age or grade. The work 
around the school buildings which can not be 
done by the pupils under the direction of the 
shop or department heads, is not done by out- 
side hired help, but is given to some school pupil 
who is interested in that sort of work and is 
ready to leave school. This pupil holds the 
position for a few months only, until he has 
no more to learn from his work or gets a better 
position outside. These pupil assistants are 
paid slightly less than they could earn if they 
went into an ofiQce, but the plan often serves to 
keep a pupil under school influences and learn- 
ing when he would otherwise have to leave 
school in order to earn money, perhaps just 
before he finishes his technical training. 

Gary has fortunately been able to begin with 
such an all-around system of education, putting 
it into operation in all her schools in a nearly 
complete form, because the town was made, as 
it were, at a stroke and has grown rapidly from 
a waste stretch of sand dunes to a prosperous 
town. But many other cities are realizing more 
and more strongly the necessity of linking their 
curriculum more closely to the lives of their 
pupils, by furnishing the children with a gen- 
eral training and outlook on life which will fit 
them for their place in the world as adults. 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 269 

Recently the Chicago public schools have been 
introducing vocational work in some of the 
school buildings, while technical high schools 
give courses that are vocational, besides work 
in trade-training. Of course such elaborate 
equipment as that in Gary is impractical in a 
building where the shops are not used by the high 
school as well as the grades. Twenty or more 
of the regular school buildings in the city have 
been fitted up with carpenter shops and cooking 
and sewing rooms as well as laboratories for 
work in science. Each one of these schools has 
a garden where the pupils learn how to do prac- 
tical city gardening. From one-fourth to even 
a half of the children's time is spent on manual 
training instead of one-eighth as in the other 
schools of the city, and in other respects the 
regular curriculum is being followed. The 
teachers in the schools who were there before 
the change of program feel convinced that the 
pupils not only get through with as much book 
work as they did when practically all their time 
was given to it, but that they actually do their 
work better because of the motive furnished by 
the hand work. 

The courses given by the schools are not uni- 
form, but most of the schools include courses 
in mechanical drawing, pattern making, metal 



270 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

work, woodwork, and printing for the boys, and 
for the girls, work in sewing, weaving, cook- 
ing, millinery, laundry, and general home-mak- 
ing. Both boys and girls have work in design- 
ing, pottery, bookbinding, and gardening. The 
program differs somewhat in different schools 
to meet the needs of the neighborhood or be- 
cause of the resources of the building; but all 
the pupils of one school take the same work, 
so that when a pupil graduates from the eighth 
grade in one of these schools he has acquired 
a good beginner's knowledge of the principles 
and processes underlying two or three trades. 
This special work is supplemented by the regu- 
lar work in music and art and this, with work 
in the elementary processes of sewing and weav- 
ing and pottery, constitutes the work for the 
younger grades. The object of this training is 
to enable the child to pick up the thread of life 
in his own community, by giving him an under- 
standing of the elements of the occupations that 
supply man's daily needs; it is not to confine 
him to the industries of his neighborhood by 
teaching him some one skilled trade. 

The laboratories for the study of the elements 
of science play a most important part in this 
work. In them the child learns to understand 
the foundations of modern industry, and so 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 271 

comes to his environment as a whole. With- 
out this comprehensive vision no true vocational 
training can be successful, for it is only as he 
sees the jDlace of different kinds of work and 
their relation to each other that the youth can 
truly choose what his own vocation is to be. 
Elementary courses in physics, chemistry, and 
botany are given pupils, and the bearing of the 
work on what they are doing in the shops is 
made clear. The botany is taught in connection 
with the gardening classes, chemistry for the 
girls is given in the form of the elements of 
food chemistry. One school gives a laboratory 
class in electricity, where the pupils make the 
industrial application of the laws they are study- 
ing, learning how to wire when they are learn- 
ing about currents, and how to make a dynamo 
when they are working on magnets, etc. All 
the pupils take a course in the elements of 
science, so that they may get a true basis for 
their ideas about the way things work. There 
is no doubt that even in this rather tentative 
form the vocational schools have proved them- 
selves a decided success, enabling pupils to do 
their book work better than before. Linking it 
with the things of everyday life gives it meaning 
and zest, and at the same time furnishes a men- 
tal and muscular control over the sort of thing 



272 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

they are going to need as adults while earning a 
living. 

There are five technical high schools in Chi- 
cago, four for boys and one for girls. In all of 
these and in three other schools there are given 
what is known as ''prevocational" courses. 
These are for pupils who have reached the legal 
age for leaving school, but who are so backward 
in their work that they ought not to be allowed 
to do so, while at the same time this backward- 
ness makes them wish not to stay. These 
classes have proved again the great value of 
training for the practical things of everyday 
life to the city child. The boys and girls who 
are put into these classes are by no means de- 
ficient: they are simply children who for one 
reason or another have not been able to get 
along in the ordinary grade school as well as 
they ought; often the reason has been poor 
health, or because the child has had to move 
from one school to another, or simply because 
the usual curriculum made so little appeal that 
they were not able to hold themselves to the 
work. The prevocational classes include the 
sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and give the 
greater part of the time to training the child 
through developing skill with his hands. Book 
work is not neglected, however, and the pupils 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 273 

are held up to the same standards that they 
would have to reach in an ordinary school, 
though they do not cover quite so much ground. 
The work can be made more varied than in the 
vocational grammar school because the equip- 
ment of the high school is available. Moreover, 
their ambition is so stimulated that very large 
numbers of them do additional work and trans- 
fer to the regular technical high school work, 
where in spite of their prior backwardness they 
do as well as the regular students. Ordinarily 
not a single one of them would ever have en- 
tered a high school. 

The girls' technical high school does about 
what the vocational grammar schools are doing 
excepting that the work is more thorough, so 
that the graduate is more nearly prepared to 
take up work in some one industry. The cook- 
ing includes work in the school lunch room, and 
training in marketing, kitchen gardening and 
general housekeeping. The vocational classes 
proper take up large-quantity cooking, house- 
hold administration, and restaurant manage- 
ment. In sewing the girls learn how to make 
their own clothes, but they learn as the work 
would have to be learned in a good dressmaking 
establishment; there is a course in machine 
operating for the girls who wish it. More ad- 



274 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW j 

vanced work teaches such principles of pattern 
making and designing as would be needed by a 
shop manager. But the most important differ- 
ence is found in the emphasis that is put on the 
artistic side of women's traditional occupa- 
tions. Drawing is taught while the girls are 
learning to design dresses, and color in the 
same way; how to make the home pleasing to 
the eye is made a vital problem in the house- 
keeping department, and the art department has 
decorated the model rooms. The pattern and 
coloring for any piece of work, whether it is a 
centerpiece to be embroidered, a dress, a piece 
of pottery, or weaving, has been carefully 
worked out in the art department by the worker 
herself before she begins upon it in the shop. 
The girls are not simply learning how to do the 
drudgery of housework more efficiently; they 
are learning how to lift it above drudgery by 
making it into a profession. 

The vocational courses in the boys' technical 
high schools continue the pupils ' study in the reg- 
ular academic subjects, and give them work in 
excellently equipped shops. There is work in 
printing, carpentry, forging, metal work, me- 
chanical drawing, and in the machine shop, well 
supplemented by the art department. The 
pupil does not specialize in one kind of work, 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 275 

but secures general training. The object of 
all the vocational courses in the grammar 
schools is to prepare the pupils for any branch 
of work that they may want to take up by giving 
them an outlook over all the branches of work 
carried on around them. The work is cultural 
in much the same way that it is cultural in 
Gary. The success of these courses in bring- 
ing boys back to school, in enabling others to 
catch up with their grade, and in keeping others 
in school, points strongly to the fact that for a 
great many pupils at least some work which 
will link their school course to the activities of 
everyday life is necessary. 

The technical high schools give two-year 
courses for the pupils who can not afford to 
stay in school for four years. They are de- 
signed to give a boy training for a definite vo- 
cation, and are at the same time broad enough 
to count for the first two years of high school 
work if the boy should be able to go on later. 
At the Lane School two-year courses are given 
in patternmaking, machine shop work, car- 
pentry, electricity, printing and mechanical 
drawing; all of these courses include work in 
English, shop arithmetic, drawing, and physi- 
ology. The four-year pupils take one of three 
courses, according to what they expect to do. 



276 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORKOW 

The technical course prepares students for col- 
lege, the architectural course prepares for work 
in an architect's oflBce, and the general trade 
course prepares for immediate entry into in- 
dustry. During the first two years of work the 
student devotes his time to the study of gen- 
eral subjects, and during the last two the major 
part of his time is put in on work that leads 
directly to the vocation that he has chosen. 
The two-year course has not cut down the total 
attendance at the school by offering a short cut 
to pupils who would otherwise stay four years. 
On the contrary, it has drawn a different class 
of boys to school, those who had expected to go 
directly to work, but who were glad to make a 
sacrifice to stay on in school two years longer 
when an opportunity appeared to put those two 
years to definite account in training for the 
chosen occupation. All these technical high 
schools have shown conclusively that boys and 
girls like to go to school and like to learn, when 
they can see whither their lessons are leading. 
Giving the young work they want to do is a more 
effective method of keeping them in school than 
are truant officers or laws. 

In the Lane School the work of the different 
departments is closely connected so that the 
pupils sees the relations of any one kind of 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 277 

work to everything he is doing. A problem 
being set to a group of students, such as the 
making of a gasoline engine or a vacuum 
cleaner, the different elements in its solution 
are worked out in the different classrooms. 
For the vacuum cleaner, for instance, the pupils 
must have reached a certain point in physics 
and electrical work before they are capable of 
trying to make the machine, since each pupil 
becomes in a sense the inventor, working out 
everything except the idea of the machine. 
When they are familiar with the principles 
which govern the cleaner they make rough 
sketches, which are discussed in the machine 
shop and altered until the sketch holds the 
promise of a practical result. In mechanical 
drawing, accurate drawings are made for the 
whole thing and for each part, from which pat- 
terns are made in the pattern shop. The pupils 
make their own molds and castings and when 
they have all the parts they construct the 
vacuum cleaner in the machine and electrical 
shops. The problem of the gasoline engine is 
worked out in a like way ; and since all the work 
that is given the pupils has been chosen for its 
utility as well as its educational value, the 
pupil does everything connected with its pro- 
duction himself, from working out the theory in 



278 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

tlie laboratory or classroom to screwing the last 
bolt. The connection of theory and practice 
not only makes the former concrete and under- 
standable, but it prevents the manual work from 
being routine and narrow. When a pupil has 
completed a problem of this sort he has in- 
creased knowledge and power. He has tested 
the facts he learned and knows what they stand 
for in terms of the use the world makes of them; 
and he has made a useful thing in a way which 
develops his own sense of independent intelli- 
gent power. 

The attempts of the Cincinnati school board 
to give the school children of that city a better 
education, by giving them a better preparation 
for the future, have been made from a some- 
what different point of view. Three-fourths of 
the school children of Cincinnati, as of so many 
other cities, leave school when they are four- 
teen years old; most of them do not go beyond 
the fifth grade. They do this because they feel 
they must go to work in order to give help at 
home. Of course a fifth-grade pupil of fourteen 
is fitted to do only the easiest and most mechan- 
ical work and so receives very low pay. Once 
at work in factory or shop on this routine kind 
of work, the chances for the worker to advance, 
or to become master of any trade, or branch of 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 279 

liis trade, are slight. His scliooling has given 
him only an elementary control of the three 
R's, and usually no knowledge of the theory or 
practice of the business he is engaged in. He 
soon finds himself in a position where he is not 
learning any more. It is only the very excep- 
tional person who will go on educating himself 
and push ahead to a position of independence 
or responsibility under such conditions. The 
person who becomes economically swamped in 
the cheapest grades of work is not going to 
show much energy or intelligence in his life as 
citizen. The experiments of the Cincinnati' 
schools in introducing manual and industrial 
training have been directed to remedying this 
evil by making the school work such that the 
pupil will desire to stay in school if this is in 
any way possible; and if it is not, by giving 
him opportunities to go on with his education 
while working. 

The Ohio law requires children to stay in 
school until they are sixteen unless they must 
go to work, when they are given a certificate 
permitting them to work for the employer with 
whom they have found their first position. 
This permission must be renewed with each 
change of position. Consequently the pupil is 
kept in school until he has found work, and if 



280 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

for any reason he stops working, the school 
keeps in touch with him and can see that he 
goes back to school. The city also conducts 
continuation schools, where most of the pupils 
who leave between the ages of fourteen and six- 
teen have to return to school for a few hours a 
week, receiving theoretical instruction in the 
work they are doing. The cash girl has lessons 
in business English, arithmetic of the sort she 
has to use, and lessons in salesmanship, and 
receives a certain amount of general instruction 
about her special branch of trade. There are 
voluntary continuation classes for workers 
above sixteen years of age, by means of which 
any shop or store is able to use the facilities 
of the public schools to make their workers more 
efficient by giving them more knowledge of the ' 
theory of the trade. 

These continuation classes are undoubtedly 
of the greatest value to the employee who can 
not go back to school, but they do not give him 
that grasp of present problems and conditions 
which would enable him intelligently to choose 
the work for which he is best suited. They im- 
prove him in a particular calling, but the call- 
ing may have been selected by accident. Their 
function is to make up to the child somewhat 
for what he has lost by having to become a wage 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 281 

earner so young. The cooperative plan which 
is being thoroughly tried out in Cincinnati is 
less of a makeshift and more of a distinct con- 
tribution to education, and has so far proved so 
successful as to be of great suggestive value. 
More than any other vocational plan it takes 
advantage of the educational value of the in- 
dustries that are most important in the com- 
munity. The factory shops of the city become 
the school shops for the pupils. Many of the 
big factories of the city have shown themselves 
willing to cooperate with the city for the first 
year of the experiment. This has proved so 
successful that many more factories are anxious 
to get their beginning workers in this way. In 
a sense it is a return to the old-fashioned ap- 
prenticeship method that prevailed when manu- 
facturing was done by hand ; for the pupils get 
their manual skill and the necessary practice in 
processes and shop conditions by working for 
wages in the city factories. 

When the plan is further along the factories 
and stores will not be the only community in- 
stitutions that will furnish laboratories for the 
school children of the city. The city college 
will begin its plan of having the domestic sci- 
ence pupils get their practice by working as 
nurses, cooks, housekeepers, or bookkeepers in 



282 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the city hospital, and the engineering and ar- 
chitectural students will get theirs by working 
in the machine shops and draught-room of the 
city. As far as possible the departments of 
the city government will be used for the pu- 
pils' workshops; where they can not furnish 
opportunities for the kind of work the pupil 
needs, he will go into an office, store, or fac- 
tory where conditions reach the standard set by 
the board of education. So far this plan has 
been tested only with the boys and girls who 
are taking the technical course in the city high 
schools. The pupils who have finished the first 
two years of work, which corresponds to the 
work of any good technical high school, begin 
working alternate weeks in shop and school. 
The pupil chooses a kind of work in which he 
wishes to specialize, and is then given a position 
in one of the factories or shops which are 
cooperating with the schools. He receives pay 
for his work as any beginner would, and does 
the regular work of the place, under the direc- 
tion of, and responsible to, the shop superin- 
tendent. One week he works here under trade 
conditions, meeting the requirements of the 
place, the next week he returns to school, 
and his place in the factory is taken by 
another pupil who has chosen the same line 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 283 

of work. The week in school is devoted en- 
tirely to theoretical work. The pupil con- 
tinues his work in English, history, mathe- 
matics, drawing, and science, and enriches his 
trade experience by a thorough study of the 
industry, all its processes and the science they 
involve, the use, history, and distribution of the 
goods, and the history of the industry. This 
alternation between factory and shop is kept 
up for the last two years of the course, and also 
during the pupil's college course, provided he 
goes on to a technical course in the city univer- 
sity. 

From the standpoint of vocational guidance, 
this method has certain distinct advantages over 
having the pupil remain in the classroom until 
he goes into a shop permanently. His practical 
work in the factory is in the nature of an ex- 
periment. If his first choice proves a failure, 
the pupil does not get the moral setback that 
comes from a failure to the self-supporting per- 
son. The school takes the attitude that the 
pupil did not make the right choice ; by cooper- 
ating with him, the effort is made to have his 
second factory experience correspond more 
nearly to his abilities and interest. A careful 
record of the pupil's work in the factory is 
kept as well as of his classroom work, and these 



284 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

two records are studied, not as separate items, 
but as interacting and inseparable. If his class 
work is good and his factory record poor, it is 
evident that he is in the wrong factory ; and the 
nature of the class work will often give a hint 
of the sort of work to which the pupil ought to 
change. If all the work is mediocre, a change 
to another kind of practical work will often re- 
sult in a marked improvement in the theoretical 
work if the change has been the right one. The 
pupil has an opportunity to test his own inter- 
ests and abilities, to find if his judgment of them 
is correct; if it is not, he has a scientific basis 
on which to form a more correct judgment. 
The work is not approached from the trade 
point of view; that is, the schools do not aim 
to turn out workers who have finished a two 
years' apprenticeship in a trade and are to that 
extent qualified as skilled workmen for that 
particular thing. The aim is to give the pupil 
some knowledge of the actual conditions in trade 
and industry so that he will have standards 
from which to make a final intelligent choice. 
The school work forms a necessary part of the 
training for this choice, for it is just as much 
a guide to the interests and bent of the boy as 
would be his success in any one shop. And it 
lifts his judgments from the plane of mere likes 




Children are interested in the things they need to know 
about. (Gary, Ind.) 




Making their own clothes in sewing class. (Gary, Ind.) 



EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY 285 

and dislikes to that of knowledge based on the- 
ory as well as practice. For the exceptional pu- 
pil who really knows what he wants, and is eager 
to go ahead with it, this plan offers distinct ad- 
vantages. The boy's desire to get to work is 
satisfied by his weeks in the shop, and in his 
classroom he is learning enough of the larger as- 
pects and possibilities of the trade to make him 
realize the value of additional theoretical train- 
ing for the satisfaction of his own practical pur- 
poses. 

As a result of the first year of working on 
this plan a large number of factories, at first 
indifferent to the plan, have asked to receive 
apprentices in this way, and a number of pupils 
have decided to go to college- who, when they 
were spending all their time in school, had no 
such intention. The technical course for girls 
includes only those occupations that are tradi- 
tionally supposed to belong to women because 
they are connected with home-making. They 
may continue for the four years working in 
school, which is made practical by having the 
pupils trim hats to wear, make their own 
clothes, do some commercial cooking, with the 
buying, selling, and bookkeeping connected with 
it; or they may specialize during the last two 
years as the boys do, by working alternate weeks 



I 



286 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

in shop and school. So far girls have gone only 
into millinery or sewing establishments, where 
they work just as do the boys under actual trade 
conditions. The aim of the work for the girl, 
just as it is for the boy, is to help her find her 
life work, to fit herself for it mentally and 
morally, and to give her an intelligent attitude 
toward her profession and her community, 
using the shop experience not as an end in itself 
but a means to these larger ends. 



CHAPTER XI 

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION" 

The schools that have been described were 
selected not because of any conviction that they 
represent all of the best work that is being done 
in this country, but simply because they illus- 
trate the general trend of education at the pres- 
ent time, and because they seem fairly repre- 
sentative of different types of schools. Of ne- 
cessity a great deal of material that would 
undoubtedly prove just as suggestive as what 
has been given, has been omitted. No attempt 
has been made to touch upon the important 
movement for the vitalization of rural educa- 
tion: a movement that is just as far reaching 
in its scope and wholesome in its aims as any- 
thing that is being done, since it purposes to 
overcome the disadvantages of isolation that 
have handicapped the country schoolteacher, 
and to make use of the natural environment of 
the child to give him a vocational education, in 
the same way that the city schools use their arti- 

287 



288 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

ficial environment. And except as their work 
illustrates a larger educational principle, very- 
little attention has been given to the work of in- 
dividual teachers or schools in their attempt 
to teach the conventional curriculum in the most 
efficient way. While devices and ingenious 
methods for getting results from pupils often 
seem most suggestive and even inspiring to the 
teacher, they do not fit into the plan of this 
book when they have to do simply with the 
better use of the usual material of the tradi- 
tional education. 

We have been concerned with the more fun- 
damental changes in education, with the 
awakening of the schools to a realization of 
the fact that their work ought to prepare chil- 
dren for the life they are to lead in the world. 
The pupils who will pass this life in intellectual 
pursuits, and who get the necessary training for 
the practical side of their lives from their home 
environment, are such a small factor numer- 
ically that the schools are not acting wisely to 
shape all the work for them. The schools we 
have been discussing are all working away from 
a curriculum adapted to a small and specialized 
class towards one which shall be truly repre- 
sentive of the needs and conditions of a demo- 
cratic society. 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 289 

While these schools are all alike in that they 
reflect the new spirit in education, they differ 
greatly in the methods that have been developed 
to bring about the desired results; their sur- 
roundings and the class of pupils dealt with are 
varied enough to suggest the influence that local 
conditions must exercise over methods even 
when the aim is identical. To the educator for 
whom the problems of democracy are at all real, 
the vital necessity appears to be that of making 
the connection between the child and his environ- 
ment as complete and intelligent as possible, 
both for the welfare of the child and for the sake 
of the community. The way this is to be ac- 
complished will, of course, vary according to the 
conditions of the community and to a certain ex- 
tent according to the temperament and beliefs of 
the educator. But great as the differences are 
between the different schools, between such a 
plan as tHat worked out by Mr. Meriam in Co- 
lumbia, Missouri, and the curriculum of the Chi- 
cago public schools, an analysis of the ideas 
back of the apparent extreme divergence of 
views, reveals certain resemblances that seem 
more fundamental than the differences. The 
resemblances are more fundamental because 
they illustrate the direction that educational re- 
form is taking, and because many of them are 



290 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

the direct result of the changes that modern 
science and psychology have brought about in 
our way of looking at the world. 

Curiously enough most of these points of sim- 
ilarity are found in the views advocated by 
Rousseau, though it is only very recently that 
they have begun to enjoy anything more than 
a theoretical respect. The first point of simi- 
larity is the importance that is accorded to the 
physical welfare of the pupils. The necessity 
of insuring the health of all young people as 
the foundation on which to build other qualities 
and abilities, and the hopelessness of trying to 
build where the body is weak, ill-nourished, or 
uncontrolled, is now so well recognized that it 
has become a commonplace and needs only a 
passing mention here. Health is as important 
from the social point of view as from the in- 
dividual, so that attention to it is doubly neces- 
sary to a successful community. 

Wliile all schools realize the importance of 
healthy pupils, the possibilities of using the ac- 
tivities of the child that are employed in giv- 
ing him a strong healthy body, for general edu- 
cational purposes, are not so well understood. 
As yet it is the pioneer in education who real- 
izes the extent to which young children learn 
through the use of their bodies, and the im- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 291 

possibility of insuring general intelligence 
through a system which does not use the body 
to teach the mind and the mind to teach the 
body. This is simply a restatement of Rous- 
seau's proposition that the education of the 
young child rests largely on whether he is 
allowed to ** develop naturally" or not. It has 
already been pointed out to what an extent Mrs. 
Johnson depends on the physical growth of her 
pupils as a tool for developing their intellectual 
ability, as well as the important part that mus- 
cular skill plays in the educational system of 
Madame Montessori. This seems not only rea- 
sonable but necessary when we think of the 
mere amount of movement, handling, and feel- 
ing of things that a baby must indulge in to 
understand the most familiar objects in its en- 
vironment, and remember that the child and the 
adult learn with the same mental machinery as 
the very small child. There is no difference in 
the way the organism works after it is able to 
talk and walk ; the difference lies in the greater 
complexity of activities which is made possible 
by the preliminary exercises. Modern psy- 
chology has pointed out the fact that the native 
instincts of a human being are his tools for 
learning. Instincts all express themselves 
through the body; therefore education which 



292 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

stifles bodily activities, stifles instincts, and so 
prevents the natural method of learning. To 
the extent of making an educational application 
of this fact, all the schools described are using 
the physical activities of their pupils, and so the 
means of their physical development, as instru- 
ments for training powers of judgment and 
right thinking. That is to say the pupils are 
learning by doing. Aside from the psycholog- 
ical reasons for teaching by this method, it is 
the logical consequence of a realization of the 
importance of the physical welfare of the child, 
and necessarily brings changes in the material 
of the schoolroom. 

What are the pupils to do in order to learn? 
Mere activity, if not directed toward some end, 
may result in developing muscular strength, 
but it can have very little effect on the mental 
development of the pupils. These schools have 
all answered the question in the same general 
way, though the definite problems on which they 
work differ. The children must have activities 
which have some educative content, that is, 
which reproduce the conditions of real life. 
This is true whether they are studying about 
things that happened hundreds of years ago or 
whether they are doing problems in arithmetic 
or learning to plane a board. The historical 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 293 

facts which are presented must be true, and 
whether the pupils are writing a play based on 
them or are building a viking boat, the details of 
the work as well as the main idea must conform 
to the known facts. When a pupil learns by do- 
ing he is reliving both mentally and physically 
some experience which has proved important to 
the human race ; he goes through the same men- 
tal processes as those who originally did these 
things. Because he has done them he knows the 
value of the result, that is, the fact. A state- 
ment, even of facts, does not reveal the value 
of the fact, or the sense of its truth — of the fact 
that it is a fact. Where children are fed only 
on book knowledge, one "fact" is as good as 
another; they have no standards of judgment 
or belief. Take the child studying weights and 
measures; he reads in his text-book that eight 
quarts make a peck, but when he does examples 
he is apt, as every schoolteacher knows, to sub- 
stitute four for eight. Evidently the statement 
as he read it in the book did not stand for any- 
thing that goes on outside the book, so it is a 
matter of accident what figure lodges in his 
brain, or whether any does. But the grocer's 
boy who has measured out pecks with a quart 
measure knows. He has made pecks ; he would 
laugh at anybody who suggested that four 



294 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

quarts made a peck. What is the difference in 
these two cases? The schoolboy has a result 
without the activity of which it is the result. 
To the grocer's boy the statement has value and 
tinith, for it is the obvious result of an expe- 
rience — it is a fact. 

Thus we see that it is a mistake to suppose 
that practical activities have only or even 
mainly a utilitarian value in the schoolroom. 
They are necessary if the pupil is to understand 
the facts which the teacher wishes him to learn ; 
if his knowledge is to be real, not verbal ; if his 
education is to furnish standards of judgment 
and comparison. With the adult it is undoubt- 
edly true that most of the activities of practical 
life have become simply means of satisfjdng 
more or less imperative wants. He has per- 
formed them so often that their meaning as 
types of human knowledge has disappeared. 
But with the school child this is not true. Take 
a child in the school kitchen; he is not merely 
preparing that day's midday meal because he 
must eat; he is learning a multitude of new 
things. In following the directions of the recipe 
he is learning accuracy, and the success or fail- 
ure of the dish serves as an excellent measure 
of the pupil's success. In measuring quantities 
he is learning arithmetic and tables of meas- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 295 

ures ; in mixing materials, he is finding out how 
substances act when they are manipulated; in 
baking or boiling he is discovering some of the 
elementary facts of physics and chemistry. 
Repetition of these acts by adults, after the mus- 
cular and intellectual mastery of the adjust- 
ments they call for has been established, gives 
the casual thinker the impression that pupils 
also are doing no more than wasting their time 
on insignificant things. The grocer's boy 
knows what a peck is because he has used it to 
measure things with, but since his stock of 
knowledge is not increased as he goes on meas- 
uring out peck after peck, the point is soon 
reached where intellectual discovery ends and 
mere performance of a task takes its place. 
This is the point where the school can see that 
the pupil's intellectual growth continues; while 
the activity of the mere worker who is doing the 
thing for its immediate practical use beco-mes 
mechanical. The school says the pupil has had 
enough of this particular experience ; he knows 
how to do this thing when he needs to and he 
has understood the principles or facts which it 
illustrates ; it is time he moved on to other ex- 
periences which will teach him other values and 
facts. When the pupil has learned how to fol- 
low a recipe, how to handle foodstuffs and use 



296 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

tlie stove he does not go on repeating the same 
elementary steps ; he begins to extend his work 
to take in the larger aspects of cooking. The 
educative value of the cooking lessons continues 
because he is now studying questions of food 
values, menus, the cost of food, and the chem- 
istry of food stuffs, and cooking. The kitchen 
becomes a laboratory for the study of a funda- 
mental factor in human life. 

The moral advantages of an active form of 
education reenforce its intellectual benefits. 
We have seen how this method of teaching 
necessitates greater freedom for the pupil, and 
that this freedom is a positive factor in the in- 
tellectual and moral development of the pupils. 
In the same way the substitution of practical 
activities for the usual isolated text-book study 
achieves positive moral results which are 
marked to any teacher who has used both meth- 
ods. Where the accumulation of facts pre- 
sented in books is the standard, memory must 
be relied upon as the principal tool for acquir- 
ing knowledge. The pupil must be stimulated 
to remember facts ; it makes comparatively little 
difference whether he has to remember them in 
the exact words of the book, or in his own words, 
for in either case the problem is to see that he 
does store up information. The inevitable re- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 297 

suit is that the child is rewarded when his mem- 
ory is successful, and punished by failure and 
low marks when it is not successful. The em- 
phasis shifts from the importance of the work 
that is done to the pupil's degree of external 
success in doing it. Since no one's performance 
is perfect, the failures become the obvious and 
emphasized thing. The pupil has to fight con- 
stantly against the discouragement of never 
reaching the standard he is told he is expected 
to reach. His mistakes are constantly corrected 
and pointed out. Such successes as he achieves 
are not especially inspiring because he does no 
more than reproduce the lesson as it already 
exists in the book. The virtues that the good 
scholar will cultivate are the colorless, negative 
virtues of obedience, docility, and submission. 
By putting himself in an attitude of complete 
passivity he is more nearly able to give back 
just what he heard from the teacher or read in 
the book. 

Rewards and high marks are at best artifi- 
cial aims to strive for; they accustom children 
to expect to get something besides the value 
of the product for work they do. The extent to 
which schools are compelled to rely upon these 
motives shows how dependent they are upon 
motives which are foreign to truly moral activ- 



298 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOKROW 

ity. But in the schools where the children are 
getting their knowledge by doing things, it is 
presented to them through all their senses and 
carried over into acts ; it needs no feat of mem- 
ory to retain what they find out; the muscles, 
sight, hearing, touch, and their own reasoning 
processes all combine to make the result part of 
the working equipment of the child. Success 
gives a glow of positive achievement ; artificial 
inducements to work are no longer necessary, 
and the child learns to work from love of the 
work itself, not for a reward or because he is 
afraid of a punishment. Activity calls for the 
positive virtues — energy, initiative, and origi- 
nality — qualities that are worth more to the 
world than even the most perfect faithfulness in 
carrying out orders. The pupil sees the value 
of his work and so sees his own progress, which 
spurs him on to further results. In consequence 
his mistakes do not assume undue importance or 
discourage him. He can actively use them as 
helps in doing better next time. Since the chil- 
dren are no longer working for rewards, the 
temptation to cheat is reduced to the minimum. 
There is no motive for doing dishonest acts, 
since the result shows whether the child has 
done the work, the only end recognized. The 
moral value of working for the sake of what is 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 299 

being done is certainly higher than that of work- 
ing for rewards ; and while it is possible that a 
really bad character will not be reformed by 
being placed in a situation where there is noth- 
ing to be gained excepting through an indepen- 
dent and energetic habit of work, the weak char- 
acter will be strengthened and the strong one 
will not form any of those small bad habits that 
seem so unimportant at first and that are so 
serious in their cumulative effect. 

Another point that most of the present day 
reformers have in common, in distinction from 
the traditional way of looking at school work, 
is the attempt to find work of interest to the 
pupils. This used to be looked at as a matter 
of very little importance; in fact a certain 
amount of work that did not interest was sup- 
posed to be a very good thing for the moral 
character of the pupil. This work was sup- 
posed to have even greater disciplinary quali- 
ties than the rest of the work. Forcing the 
child to carry through a task which did not ap- 
peal to him was supposed to develop persever- 
ance and strength of character. There is no 
doubt that the ability to perform an irksome 
duty is a very useful accomplishment, but the 
usefulness does not lie in the irksomeness of the 
task. Things are not useful or necessary be- 



300 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

cause they are unpleasant or tiresome, but in 
spite of these characteristics. The habit of giv- 
ing work to pupils solely for the sake of its 
''disciplinary" value would seem to indicate a 
blindness to moral values rather than an ex- 
cess of moral zeal, for after all the habit is little 
more than holding up a thing's defects as its 
virtues. 

But if lack of interest is not to be admitted as 
a motive in selection of class work, it is fair 
enough to object that interest can not serve as 
a criterion, either. If we take interest in its 
narrowest sense, as meaning something which 
amuses and appeals to the child because of its 
power of entertainment, the objection has truth. 
The critic of the new spirit in education is apt 
to assume that this narrow sense is what is 
meant when he hears that the pupils ought to 
be interested in what they are doing. Then 
logically enough he goes on to point out that 
such a system lacks moral fiber, that it caters 
to the whims of children, and is in reality an 
example of the general softening of the social 
fiber, of every one's desire for the easy way. 
But the work is not made easy for the pupils ; nor 
yet is there any attempt to give the traditional 
curriculum a sugar coating. The change is of 
a more fundamental character and is based on 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 301 

sound psychological theory. The work given to 
the children has changed ; the attempt is not to 
make all the child's tasks interesting to him, 
but to select work on the basis of the natural 
appeal it makes to the child. Interest ought 
to be the basis for selection because children are 
interested in the things they need to learn. 
Every one is familiar with the way a baby will 
spend a long time making over and over again 
the same motions or feeling of some object, and 
of the intense interest children two and three 
years old take in building a tower of blocks, or 
filling a pail with sand. They do it not once 
but scores of times, and always with the same 
deep absorption, for it is real work to them. 
Their growing, unformed muscles have not yet 
learned to act automatically ; every motion that 
is aimed at something must be repeated under 
the conscious direction of the child's mind until 
h-e can make it without being aware of effort 
towards an adjustment. Since the little child 
must adjust the things about him, his interests 
and his needs are identical ; if they were not he 
could not live. As a child grows older his con- 
trol over his immediate needs so rapidly be- 
comes automatic, that we are apt to forget that 
he still learns as the baby does. The necessary 
thing is still, as it will be all his life, the power 



302 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

of adjustment. Good adjustment means a suc- 
cessful human being, so that instinctively we are 
more interested in learning these adjustments 
than in anything else. Now the child is inter- 
ested in adjusting himself through physical ac- 
tivity to the things he comes up against, because 
he must master his physical environment to live. 
The things that are of interest to him are the 
things that he needs to work on. It is then the 
part of wisdom in selecting the work for any 
group of children, to take it from that group of 
things in the child 's environment which is arous- 
ing their curiosity and interest at that time. 
Obviously as the child grows older and his con- 
trol of his body and physical environment in- 
creases he will reach out to the more compli- 
cated and theoretical aspects of the life he sees 
about him. 

But in just this same way the work in the 
classroom reaches out to include facts andl 
events which do not belong in any obvious way 
to the child's immediate environment. Thus 
the range of the material is not in any way 
limited by making interest a standard for se- 
lection. Work that appeals to pupils as worth 
while, that holds out the promise of resulting 
in something to their own interests, involves 
just as much persistence and concentration as 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 303 

the work which is given by the sternest ad- 
vocate of disciplinary drill. The latter requires 
the pupil to strive for ends which he can not 
see, so that he has to be kept at the task by 
means of offering artificial ends, marks, and 
promotions, and by isolating him in an atmos- 
phere where his mind and senses are not being 
constantly besieged by the call of life which ap- 
peals so strongly to him. But the pupil pre- 
sented with a problem, the solution of which will 
give him an immediate sense of accomplishment 
and satisfied curiosity, will bend all his powers 
to the work ; the end itself will furnish the stim- 
ulus necessary to carry him through the 
drudgery. 

The conventional type of education which 
trains children to docility and obedience, to the 
careful performance of imposed tasks because 
they are imposed, regardless of where they lead, 
is suited to an autocratic society. These are 
the traits needed in a state where there is one 
head to plan and care for the lives and institu- 
tions of the people. But in a democracy they 
interfere with the successful conduct of society 
and government. Our famous, brief definition 
of a democracy, as ''government of the people, 
for the people and by the people," gives per- 
haps the best clew to what is involved in a 



304 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

democratic society. Responsibility for the con- 
duct of society and government rests on every 
member of society. Therefore, every one must 
receive a training that will enable him to meet 
this responsibility, giving him just ideas of the 
condition and needs of the people collectively, 
and developing those qualities which will in- 
sure his doing a fair share of the work of gov- 
ernment. If we train our children to take 
orders, to do things simply because they are told 
to, and fail to give them confidence to act and 
think for themselves, we are putting an almost 
insurmountable obstacle in the way of overcom- 
ing the present defects of our system and of 
establishing the truth of democratic ideals. 
Our State is founded on freedom, but when we 
train the State of to-morrow, we allow it just 
as little freedom as possible. Children in 
school must be allowed freedom so that they 
will know what its use means when they become 
the controlling body, and they must be allowed 
to develop active qualities of initiative, inde- 
pendence, and resourcefulness, before the 
abuses and failures of democracy will disap- 
pear. 

The spread of the realization of this connec- 
tion between democracy and education is per- 
haps the most interesting and significant phase 



I 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 305 

of present educational tendencies. It accounts 
for the growing interest in popular education, 
and constitutes a strong reenforcement to the 
arguments of science and psychology for the 
changes which have been outlined. There is no 
doubt that the text-book method of education is 
well suited to that small group of children who by 
environment are placed above the necessity of en- 
gaging in practical life and who are at the same 
time interested in abstract ideas. But even for 
this tjT^e of person the system leaves great gaps 
in his grasp of knowledge; it gives no place to 
the part that action plays in the development 
of intelligence, and it trains along the lines of 
the natural inclinations of the student and does 
not develop the practical qualities which are 
usually weak in the abstract person. For the 
great majority whose interests are not abstract, 
and who have to pass their lives in some prac- 
tical occupation, usually in actually working with 
their hands, a method of education is necessary 
which bridges the gap between the purely intel- 
lectual and theoretical sides of life and their own 
occupations. With the spread of the ideas of 
democracy, and the accompanying awakening to 
social problems, people are beginning to realize 
that every one, regardless of the class to which 
he happens to belong, has a right to demand an 



306 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

education whicli shall meet his own needs, and 
that for its own sake the State must supply this 
demand. 

Until recently school education has met the 
needs of only one class of people, those who are 
interested in knowledge for its own sake, teach- 
ers, scholars, and research workers. The idea 
that training is necessary for the man who 
works with his hands is still so new that the 
schools are only just beginning to admit that 
control of the material things of life is knowl- 
edge at all. Until very recently schools have 
neglected the class of people who are nmner- 
ically the largest and upon whom the whole 
world depends for its supply of necessities. 
One reason for this is the fact that democracy 
is a comparatively new thing in itself; and until 
its advent, the right of the majority, the very 
people who work with their hands, to supply 
any of their larger spiritual needs was never 
admitted. Their function, almost their reason 
for existence, was to take care of the material 
wants of the ruling classes. 

Two great changes have occurred in the last 
century and a half which have altered men's 
habits of living and of thinking. We have just 
seen how one of these, the growth of democratic . 
ideals, demands a change in education. The 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 307 

other, the change that has come about through 
scientific discoveries, must also be reflected in 
the classroom. To piece together all one's his- 
torical information into a rough picture of so- 
ciety before the discovery of the steam engine 
and of electricity, will hardly serve to delineate 
sufficiently the changes in the very fundamen- 
tals of society that these and similar discoveries 
have brought about. The one possibly most 
significant from the point of view of education 
is the incredible increase in the number of facts 
that must be part of the mental furniture of any 
one who meets even the ordinary situations of 
life successfully. They are so many that any 
attempt to teach them all from text-books in 
school hours would be simply ridiculous. But 
the schools instead of facing this frankly and 
then changing their curriculum so that they 
cou»ld teach pupils how to learn from the world 
itself, have gone on bravely teaching as many 
facts as possible. The changes made have been 
in the way of inventing schemes that would in- 
crease the consumption of facts. But the 
change that is demanded by science is a more 
radical one; and as far as it has been worked 
out at present it follows the general lines that 
have been suggested in this book. This in- 
cludes, as the curricula of these different schools 



308 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOREOW 

have shown, not alone teaching of the scientific 
laws that have brought about the changes in so- 
ciety since their discovery, but the substitution 
of real work which itself teaches the facts of life 
for the study and memorization of facts after 
they have been classified in books. 

If schools are to recognize the needs of all 
classes of pupils, and give pupils a training that 
will insure their becoming successful and valu- 
able citizens, they must give work that will not 
only make the pupils strong physically and 
morally and give them the right attitude to- 
wards the state and their neighbors, but that 
will as well give them enough control over their 
material environment to enable them to be 
economically independent. Preparation for the 
professions has always been taken care of; it 
is, as we have seen, the future of the worker in 
industry which has been neglected. The com- 
plications of modern industry due to scientific 
discoveries make it necessary for the worker 
who aspires to real success to have a good 
foundation of general education on which to 
build his technical skill, and the complications 
of human nature make it equally necessary that 
the beginner shall find his way into work that 
is suited to his tastes and abilities. A discus- 
sion of general educational principles is con- 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 309 

cerned only with industrial or vocational educa- 
tion which supplies these two needs. The ques- 
tions of specific trade and professional training 
fall wholly outside the scope of this book. How- 
ever, certain facts connected with the movement 
to push industrial training in its narrower sense 
have a direct bearing on the larger question. 
For there is great danger just at present that, 
as the work spreads, the really educative type 
of work that is being done in Gary and Chicago 
may be overlooked in favor of trade training. 
The attention of influential citizens is more 
easily focused on the need of skilled workers 
than on that of a general educational readjust- 
ment. The former is brought home to them by 
their own experience, perhaps by their self- 
interest. They are readily impressed with the 
extent to which Germany has made technical 
trade training a national asset in pushing the 
commercial rivalries of that empire. Nothing 
seems so direct and practical as to establish a 
system of continuation schools to improve 
workers between the ages of fourteen and 
eighteen who have left school at the earliest 
age, and to set up separate schools which shall 
prepare directly for various lines of shop work, 
leaving the existing schools practically un- 
changed to prepare pupils for higher schools 



310 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

and for the walks of life where there is less 
manual work. 

Continuation schools are valuable and im- 
portant, but only as palliatives and makeshifts ; 
they deal with conditions which ought not to 
exist. Children should not leave school at four- 
teen, but should stay in school until they are six- 
teen or eighteen, and be helped to an intelligent 
use of their energies and to the proper choice 
of work. It is a commonplace among teachers 
and workers who come in contact with any num- 
ber of pupils who leave school at fourteen to 
go to work, that the reason is not so much finan- 
cial pressure as it is lack of conviction that 
school is doing them any good. Of course there 
are cases where the child enjoys school but is 
forced to leave at the first opportunity in order 
to earn money. But even in these rare in- 
stances it would usually be wiser to continue 
the family arrangements that were in vogue up 
to the child's fourteenth birthday, even if they 
include charity. The wages of the child of four- 
teen and fifteen are so low that they make a 
material difference only to the family who is 
already living on an inadequate scale. 

The hopelessness of the situation is increased 
by the fact that these children increase their 
earning capacity much more slowly and reach as 



DEMOCEACY AND EDUCATION 311 

their maximum a much lower level than the child 
who is kept in school, so that in the long run the 
loss both to the child and his family more than 
offsets the precarious temporary gain. But the 
commonest reason advanced by pupils for leav- 
ing school is that they did not like it, and were 
anxious to get some real work to do. Not that 
they were prepared to go to work, or had fin- 
ished any course of training, but simply that 
school seemed so futile and satisfied so few of 
their interests that they seized the first oppor- 
tunity to make a change to something that 
seemed more real, something where there was 
a visible result. 

What is needed then is a reorganization of 
the ordinary school work to meet the needs of 
this class of pupils, so that they will wish to stay 
in school for the value of what they are learn- 
ing. The present system is bungling and short- 
sighted ; continuation schools patch up some of 
its defects ; they do not overcome them, nor do 
they enable the pupils to achieve a belated in- 
tellectual growth, where the maladjustment of 
the elementary school has served to check it. 
The ideal is not to use the schools as tools of 
existing industrial systems, but to use industry 
for the reorganization of the schools. 

There is danger that the concentrated inter- 



312 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

ests of business men and their influential ac- 
tivity in public matters will segregate training 
for industry to the damage of both democracy 
and education. Educators must insist upon the 
primacy of educational values, not in their own 
behalf, but because these represent the more 
fundamental interests of society, especially of 
a society organized on a democratic basis. The 
place of industry in education is not to hurry 
the preparation of the individual pupil for his 
individual trade. It should be used (as in the 
Gary, Indianapolis, and other schools) to give 
practical value to the theoretical knowledge that 
every pupil should have, and to give him an 
understanding of the conditions and institutions 
of his environment. "When this is done the 
pupil will have the necessary knowledge and 
intelligence to make the right choice of work 
and to direct his own efforts towards getting the 
necessary technical skill. His choice will not 
be limited by the fact that he already knows how 
to do one thing and only one ; it will be dictated 
only by his own ability and natural aptitude. 
The trade and continuation schools take their 
pupils before they are old enough or have 
knowledge enough of their own power to be able 
to make a wise choice, and then they drill them 
in one narrow groove, both in their theoretical 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 313 

work and in their manual skill, so that the pupil 
finds himself marked for one occupation only. 
If it proves not to be the right one for him it 
is still the only one he is trained for. Such a 
system does not give an opportunity for the 
best development of the individual's abilities, 
and it tends to keep people fixed in classes. 

The very industries that seem to benefit most 
by receiving skilled workers for the first steps 
of the trade will lose by it in the more dif- 
ficult processes, for the workers will not have 
the background of general knowledge and wider 
experience that the graduate of a technical high 
school or vocational school should have ac- 
quired. But the introduction of the material 
of occupations into the schools for the sake of 
the control of the environment brought by their 
use will do much to give us the proportion of 
independent, intelligent citizens that are needed 
in a democracy. 

It is fatal for a democracy to permit the 
formation of fixed classes. Differences of 
wealth, the existence of large masses of un- 
skilled laborers, contempt for work with the 
hands, inability to secure the training which 
enables one to forge ahead in life, all operate 
to produce classes, and to widen the gulf be- 
tween them. Statesmen and legislation can do 



314 SCHOOLS OF TO-MOEROW 

something to combat these evil forces. Wise 
philanthropy can do something. But the only 
fundamental agency for good is the public 
school system. Every American is proud of 
wliat has been accomplished in the past in fos- 
tering among very diverse elements of popula- 
tion a spirit of unity and of brotherhood so that 
the sense of common interests and aims has pre- 
vailed over the strong forces working to divide 
our people into classes. The increasing com- 
plexity of our life, with the great accumulation 
of wealth at one social extreme and the condi- 
tion of almost dire necessity at the other makes 
the task of democracy constantly more difficult. 
The days are rapidly passing when the simple 
provision of a system in which all individuals 
mingle is enough to meet the need. The sub- 
ject-matter and the methods of teaching must 
be positively and aggressively adapted to the 
end. 

There must not be one system for the chil- 
dren of parents who have more leisure and 
another for the children of those who are wage- 
earners. The physical separation forced by 
such a scheme, while unfavorable to the develop- 
ment of a proper mutual sympathy, is the least 
of its evils. "Worse is the fact that the over 
bookish education for some and the over ''prac- 



i 



DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION 315 

tical" education for others brings about a divi- 
sion of mental and moral babits, ideals and out- 
look. 

The academic education turns out future citi- 
zens with no sympathy for work done with the 
hands, and with absolutely no training for un- 
derstanding the most serious of present day 
social and political difficulties. The trade train- 
ing will turn future workers who may have 
greater immediate skill than they would have 
had without their training, but who have no 
enlargement of mind, no insight into the scien- 
tific and social significance of the work they do, 
no education which assists them in finding their 
way on or in making their own adjustments. A 
division of the public school system into one 
part which pursues traditional methods, with 
incidental improvements, and another which 
deals with those who are to go into manual 
labor means a plan of social predestination 
totally foreign to the spirit of a democracy. 

The democracy which proclaims equality of 
opportunity as its ideal requires an education 
in which learning and social application, ideas 
and practice, work and recognition of the mean- 
ing of what is done, are united from the begin- 
ning and for all. Schools such as we have dis- 
cussed in this book — and they are rapidly com- 



316 SCHOOLS OF TO-MORROW 

ing into being in large numbers all over the 
country — are showing how the ideal of equal 
opportunity for all is to be transmuted into 
reality. 



3477 



